Radical Virtues - by Richard White (Paperback)

About the Book

Richard White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and animal rights. White's philosophical treatment of virtue ethics is extended through historical and cross-cultural analysis to help the reader ...

Book Synopsis

Richard White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and animal rights. White's philosophical treatment of virtue ethics is extended through historical and cross-cultural analysis to help the reader understand and acquire moral wisdom.

Review Quotes

...non-technical style and language accessible to the readers outside academic circles.... Recommend.... Could profitably be assigned to upper level undergraduates in courses in moral theory or social and political philosophy.... Useful.

Radical Virtues, an innovative and exciting text, grounds the virtues in contemporary issues: this is a considerable asset. As White skillfully and plausibly shows, the virtues can infect everything we say about them, and the very readable prose will make this book useful for students and lay readers. It will advance the conversation considerably.

A virtuous book - it performs its function well, showing us what virtue is and how the virtuous life is lived in particular societies and leads us toward moral wisdom. White's analysis is thoughtful and temperate with a cross-cultural sensitivity that enhances traditional approaches to the virtue.

Richard White's Radical Virtues is a lovely, timely book, and a pleasure to read. Few have so successfully bridged the gap between focused scholarship and making important ideas available to a larger public that in fact is in desperate need of them. Furthermore, the virtues are here rescued from some of the reactionary purposes to which they have been put in recent decades. This book opens a pathway toward a moral life of greater depth, and therefore it engages in a crucial, albeit uphill, struggle of our present period of social and individual depthlessness.

The strength of Radical Virtues is the author's ability to present the classical authors in a way that is accessible to students and relevant to the social-political issues with which they are increasingly concerned.

White offers a fresh look at five core virtues: courage, temperance, justice, compassion, and wisdom. He explores a range of possible interpretations of each across both time and cultures....Recommended.

About the Author

Richard White is professor of philosophy at Creighton University. He is the author of Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (1997) and Love's Philosophy (2001), also published by Rowman & Littlefield.