The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, Volume 1: Historical Understanding and the History of Philosophy

The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, Volume 1: Historical Understanding and the History of Philosophy

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 1 includes essays on Spinoza, Descartes, Bradley, Collingwood, Russell, Moore, and Popper, as well as two previously unpublished papers on the history of philosophy as a discipline, and on Ryle and Wittgenstein's nature of philosophy. Linked by Donagan's commitment to the central importance of history for philosophy and his interest in problems of historical understanding, these essays represent the remarkable scope of Donagan's thought. Donagan (formerly Phyllis Fay Horton Professor of Humanities, Univ. of Chicago) has had a distinguished career in philosophy, most notably in the areas of the history of philosophy and of ethics. These two volumes gather together 28 of his most influential essays written between 1957 and 1991, including two that are appearing in print for the first time. Volume 1 contains papers on Spinoza, Bradley, Mill, Popper, Collingwood, Moore, Russell, Ryle, and Wittgenstein, while Volume 2 is concerned with moral theory and applied ethics and contains papers on Kant, Sellars, and von Wright. The short preface by Stephen Toulmin and the introduction by Malpas are valuable for their placing of Donagan and his work within the context of 20th-century philosophy. There is a uniformly high quality to the papers, both in style and in content, and the selection is sufficiently broad to interest readers both in Donagan's interpretations of his subjects and in the subjects themselves. Recommended for all institutions serving programs in philosophy.?Terry Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.