Gary Steiner is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Bucknell University.

Introduction

Chapter One: Background Ideals of Living

1. A Counterintuitive Idea

2. Background Ideals of Living in the Philosophical Tradition

3. Anthropocentric Implications of Some Contemporary Approaches

4. Anthropocentric and Non-Anthropocentric Background Ideals of Living

Chapter Two: The Essential Role and Pitfalls of Reason in Moral Judgment

1. Background Ideals of Living and Our Basic Understanding of Reason

2. Two Early Exponents of Anthropocentric Rationality: Aristotle and Seneca

3. The Enlightenment's Chief Exponent of Anthropocentric Rationality: Kant

4. Questioning the Traditional Commitment to the Primacy of Reason

Chapter Three: Historical Idealism and the Process of Critical Reflection

1. Rationality: Rethink or Reject?

2. Rorty's Challenge to Reason and Criteria

3. The Ideal of Critical Detachment Revisited

4. Ortega's Turn to Historical Reason

5. Miller's Actualism and the Problem of Universals

6. A Concluding Thought

Chapter Four: The Affective Dimension of Moral Commitment

1. Background Ideals of Living and the Putative Autonomy of Reason

2. A Positive Path Beyond the Limits of Reason?

3. Reclaiming a Guiding Place for the Emotions

4. Pre-Predicative Meaning and Affective Engagement

5. The Moral Community is Neither Exclusively Nor Primarily Human

Chapter Five: Felt Kinship: The Essential Tension Between Local and Global Commitments

1. The Power and Essential Limits of Reason

2. The Power and Essential Limits of Feeling or Emotion

3. Toward a Dialectical Conception of the Reason-Emotion Dichotomy

4. Toward a Well-Tempered Humanism

Bibliography