Abstract

This is a special edition of Ethical Perspectives devoted to the issue of autonomy. While the issue of autonomy has its own particular form in Anglo- American discussion, the essays in this issue focus, in the main, on questions arising in the more continental tradition. The essay by William Desmond examines certain dialectical equivocities in the notion of self-determination. These are related to an underlying sense of valuelessness marking modernity’s feeling for the ethos, to a propensity to privilege self over other in the process of self-determination, and to a temptation to evade the question of transcendence as other to human self-transcendence. These dialectical equivocities are explored especially with reference to such major thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche