The Rhetoric Of Context
Journal of Religious Ethics 41 (4):555-584 (2013)
Abstract
This paper presents a critical appraisal of the recent turn in comparative religious ethics to virtue theory; it argues that the specific aspirations of virtue ethicists to make ethics more contextual, interdisciplinary, and practice-centered has in large measure failed to match the rhetoric. I suggest that the focus on the category of the human and practices associated with self-formation along with a methodology grounded in “analogical imagination” has actually poeticized the subject matter into highly abstract textual studies on normative voices within traditions, largely in isolation from considerations of socio-historical context, political and institutional pressures, and the lived ethics of non-elite moral actors. I conclude with some programmatic suggestions for how the field of comparative religious ethics can move forwardAuthor's Profile
DOI
10.1111/jore.12032
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Citations of this work
On Comparative Religious Ethics as a Field of Study.Elizabeth M. Bucar & Aaron Stalnaker - 2014 - Journal of Religious Ethics 42 (2):358-384.
Pierre Hadot on Habit, Reason, and Spiritual Exercises.Daniel del Nido - 2018 - Journal of Religious Ethics 46 (1):7-36.
Comparative Religious Ethics Among the Ruins.Jung Lee - 2014 - Journal of Religious Ethics 42 (3):571-584.
On the Legacy of Christian Ethics in Comparative Religious Ethics.Sumner B. Twiss - 2019 - Journal of Religious Ethics 47 (4):759-772.
References found in this work
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.Edmund Husserl - 1970 - Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge University Press.
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises From Socrates to Foucault.Pierre Hadot - 1997 - Blackwell.
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1):187-190.