Modern Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Stephen Darwall holds the Andrew Downey Orrick Chair of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of The Second-Person Standpoint (2006) and also of many other works which include the previous two volumes in the trilogy of which the present volume constitutes the third part, namely Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant (2023) and Modern Moral Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (2025), which are both likewise published by Cambridge University Press.

• Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The Beginnings of Analytic Metaethics and the Analytic/Continental Divide; 2. The Origins of Twentieth-Century Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, et al.; 3. Anglophone Ethics and Metaethics at Mid-Twentieth Century; 4. Mid-Twentieth Century European Ethics: Murdoch, Sartre, Beauvoir, Løgstrup, Levinas; 5. Rawls, Parfit, Scanlon, and the 'Great Expansion' of Normative Moral Theory; 6. Anscombe, MacIntyre, Foot, Williams, The Virtue-Ethical Turn, and Feminist Ethical Philosophy; 7. Metaethical Renewal: Normativity and its 'Sources'; 8. Theorizing Racial and Gender Oppression: Nonideal Theory; Works Cited; Index.

'Stephen Darwall's Modern Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century is a tour de force by one of today's most ecumenical and influential moral philosophers. Even those who know this history well will find surprising new insights on almost every page. Not a corner of the highly ramified world of twentieth-century moral philosophy is absent from this conceptually rigorous yet narratively accessible story. Particularly notable is the dialogue that the author, himself a theorist of the second-person standpoint, constructs between the 'perspectival' moral thought of the Continental tradition and the approach, focused on conceptual analysis, that began with G. E. Moore. Darwall's inclusion of 'non-ideal theory,' which developed as a way to think about issues of race, gender, and class by foregrounding concrete social and political circumstances, is a particularly well-chosen way to leave us on the threshold of the twenty-first century.' Steven Crowell, Rice University