Ethics and Metaphysics (A Revisitation). XVI Aranguren Lectures

Abstract

The first of the two great sections in which the text is divided is a review of the half-century of «vicissitudes of reason» traversed by ethics, from the origins of the «linguistic turn» of contemporary philosophy right across to the challenge posed to it by the characteristically postmodern so-called «postmetaphysical thought». Confronting the latter, but dealing at the same time with any attempts at restoring the old premodern metaphysics, the second part of the text defends the convenience —or, rather, the necessity— of having moral philosophy maintain its openness to what has been termed as «the metaphysical horizon of ethics», in Aranguren- style coinage. Such openness would allow moral philosophers to take on both «the question regarding (the conditions of possibility of) what is real» in which ethics is deeply rooted and «the question regarding (the conditions of realization of) what is possible » which merges the aforesaid ethics with the best of utopian thought, as well as to finally face those ultimate questions or «unanswerable questions» which, from the modern era to this day and age, insist on reminding us that the emblem of philosophy, and of moral philosophy at that, is none other than the question mark.