Avoiding the dry and tedious, Professor Shenefelt strives to capture what is interesting and engaging in philosophy -- by strolling with the reader down the discipline's royal road. He explains (a) how Plato and Kant deal with the timeless question, Why be moral?; (b) how Aristotle and the Stoics answer the question, What is the good life?; and (c) how Jeremy Bentham, who provided in his will for his own mummification, tries to reduce all moral questions to a mathematical calculus of pleasure over pain.
Shenefelt writes for those with no formal training in the field but also engages the specialist -- expounding, for example, Edmund Burke's attack on systematic moral theory, an attack that the author thinks is no less cogent today. He also relates Adam Smith's explanation of Europe's extraordinary power -- an explanation that traces Europe's political and economic dominance to accidents of geography. And these same geographical accidents, he says, show why so many philosophical classics happen to come from Europeans.
In a conversational tone, The Questions of Moral Philosophy discusses most of the authors typically assigned in a western civilization course, covering not only epistemology and metaphysics, but, uniquely, morality and politics as well. Professor Shenefelt connects great works of the past with the real problems of today, and draws from his nineteen years' experience in teaching classic literature, first as a preceptor of "Contemporary Civilization, " the wellknown survey of western civilization at Columbia University, then as a Master Teacher in New York University's General Studies Program.
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