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9780192848536

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David McPherson enables us to see the deep human need for limits, and how it runs through our life. This is a book of great importance in the face of contemporary understandings of ethics and the great challenges that human beings confront. * Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia * If philosophy is about how one should live one's life, McPherson's The Virtues of Limits is exemplary. It shows how human flourishing, individual and collective, depends on accepting our limits, and on cultivating the virtues associated with this attitude, such as humility, reverence, neighbourliness, and loyalty. McPherson writes without jargon or undue technicality, while at the same time arguing with due academic rigour, and with a fair-minded engagement with those contemporary philosophers who follow in Nietzsche's footsteps in wishing to remove limits from our striving, whether those limits be genetic, individual, political, or economic. This book is of great appeal in showing the life-affirming but often unremarked and under-stated appeal of a life lived within its proper limits. * Anthony O'Hear, Professor of Philosophy, University of Buckingham, and former Director, Royal Institute of Philosophy * This fluent and ambitious study articulates an integrated vision of the good life that ranges over both the individual and the socio-political dimensions of morality. Its unifying idea, that of 'limiting virtues', yields a species of virtue theory that is genuinely original both as regards the specific virtues that are highlighted, and as regards the rationale for their selection and their role in securing human flourishing. * John Cottingham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading, and Honorary Fellow, St John's College, Oxford University * In The Virtues of Limits, David McPherson offers us an historically rich and philosophically robust defence of the idea that humans flourish only when and insofar as they recognize and abide by certain well-founded constraints. What is particularly valuable about his treatment is that it demonstrates how the importance of such constraints is evidenced across different domains: existential, moral, political, and economic. The cogency of this demonstration is matched only by its timeliness, given that our time is one that finds constraints as such increasingly hard to rationalize. * Tom Angier, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cape Town *

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David McPherson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University. He works in the areas of ethics (especially virtue ethics), political philosophy, meaning in life, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is President of Philosophers in Jesuit Education, and he is also a co-founder of The Heartland Virtue Ethics Network.

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