 1st edition (US) | |
| Author | Alexander McCall Smith |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Sunday Philosophy Club Series |
| Subject | Isabel Dalhousie |
| Publisher | Little, Brown (UK) Pantheon Books (US) |
Publication date | 7 August 2007 |
| Media type | Hardback |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 0-375-42301-X |
| Preceded by | The Right Attitude to Rain |
| Followed by | The Comfort of Saturdays |
The Careful Use of Compliments is the fourth book in The Sunday Philosophy Club Series by Alexander McCall Smith.
After her son, Charlie's, birth Isabel feels that her life has hit a happy (or happier) patch. Deciding that she may bid for a painting at auction, she visits the showroom, where she has arranged to meet Jamie (her son's father). Jamie proposes but Isabel says that she thinks they should wait, half-hoping that Jamie will press his case. She is a little disappointed when he agrees with her, but accepts that they have made the correct decision.
To her distress, she learns that the editorial board of the Review of Applied Ethics, which she edits, has decided to replace her, an action that she effectively reverses although not without her usual philosophical qualms and musings.
Meanwhile, she becomes interested in the life and recent death of Andrew McInnes, an artist most of whose paintings feature the island of Jura and who was lost in a boating accident there some years previously. Travelling with her fiancé, Jamie, and Charlie to the place of his loss she discovers new information about a more recent painter who was painting similar scenes. Her investigations into a possible art fraud unearth something quite unexpected.
At the beginning of the novel, Isabel's baby is three months old. Reflecting on philosophy and infancy, she muses that Immanuel Kant, "although he would have acknowledged, of course, that each baby should be treated as an end in its own right, and not as a means to an end," would most likely have found babies "too irrational, too messy," whereas her fellow Scot David Hume "would have found babies good company because they were full of emotions, unexpressed perhaps, or made known only in the crudest manners, but emotions nonetheless." [1]
Isabel clearly likes Hume, both as a philosopher and as a person. He was, she recalls, known as "the good Davey". [1] She is therefore shocked when a philosopher she dislikes dismisses Hume with the remark that "there's so much more to be learnt about our emotions" from magnetic resonance imaging. "Isabel stared at him incredulously. This was pure nonsense." [2]
One of Plato's most famous metaphors has a particular significance for Isabel: "There were two horses in the soul, she thought, as Socrates had said in the Phaedrus — the one, unruly, governed by passions, pulling in the direction of self-indulgence; the other, restrained, dutiful, governed by a sense of shame." [3] Torn between seeking petty satisfaction and being high-minded in her dealings with those who had tried to oust her as editor of the Review, she thinks: "Plato's white horse and dark horse. She closed her eyes. Revenge was sweet, but it was wrong, and she should not repay them in the coin they had used on her. No, she should not." Her lawyer senses that he has "just witnessed a great moral struggle." [4]
Caught in another of her moral quandaries, Isabel briefly considers "the attractions of disengagement, of a policy of not worrying about the world." But then she muses that, if one looks hard enough, one will probably find that the "big issues" that disengaged people ignore have "merely been replaced by small concerns that can be every bit as pressing. The successes of a football team — or, more pertinently, its failures — could be the cause of a good deal of anguish; arguments with neighbours, worries over money — all of these could weigh as heavily as the greater matters. So being disengaged was more of an apparent solution than a real one." [4]
Kirkus Reviews said: "Emphasizing, as usual, ethical quiddities that most mysteries either ignore or take for granted, Smith produces another absorbing case in which Isabel doesn't so much detect as interfere in a quietly masterful way more frivolous sleuths can only envy." [5]
Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans. Reason is sometimes referred to as rationality.
Moral realism is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world, some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism, error theory ; and non-cognitivism. Within moral realism, the two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.
Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes. Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory. Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.
Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, uses the Chariot Allegory to explain his view of the human soul. He creates this allegory in the dialogue through the character of Socrates, who uses it in a discussion of the merit of Love as "divine madness".
The is–ought problem, as articulated by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, arises when one makes claims about what ought to be that are based solely on statements about what is. Hume found that there seems to be a significant difference between positive statements and prescriptive or normative statements, and that it is not obvious how one can coherently move from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Hume's law or Hume's guillotine is the thesis that, if a reasoner only has access to non-moral and non-evaluative factual premises, the reasoner cannot logically infer the truth of moral statements.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a 1759 book by Adam Smith. It provided the ethical, philosophical, psychological, and methodological underpinnings to Smith's later works, including The Wealth of Nations (1776), Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795), and Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms (1763).
The Apology of Socrates, written by Plato, is a Socratic dialogue of the speech of legal self-defence which Socrates spoke at his trial for impiety and corruption in 399 BC.
Socratic dialogue is a genre of literary prose developed in Greece at the turn of the fourth century BC. The earliest ones are preserved in the works of Plato and Xenophon and all involve Socrates as the protagonist. These dialogues and subsequent ones in the genre present a discussion of moral and philosophical problems between two or more individuals illustrating the application of the Socratic method. The dialogues may be either dramatic or narrative. While Socrates is often the main participant, his presence in the dialogue is not essential to the genre.
Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, who was inspired by the ethics of Aristotle. Along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, she is credited with inventing the trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.
The fact–value distinction is a fundamental epistemological distinction described between:
The Sunday Philosophy Club is a series of novels by the author Alexander McCall Smith. It is also the name of the first novel in the series, and an informal talking group founded by the main character Isabel Dalhousie. The series is set in Edinburgh.
The Sunday Philosophy Club is the first of the Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, set in Edinburgh, Scotland, and featuring the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie. It was first published in 2004.
The Right Attitude to Rain is the third of the Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, set in Edinburgh, Scotland, and featuring the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie. It was first published in 2006, and is the sequel to Friends, Lovers, Chocolate.
Moral rationalism, also called ethical rationalism, is a view in meta-ethics according to which moral principles are knowable a priori, by reason alone. Some prominent figures in the history of philosophy who have defended moral rationalism are Plato and Immanuel Kant. Perhaps the most prominent figure in the history of philosophy who has rejected moral rationalism is David Hume. Recent philosophers who have defended moral rationalism include Richard Hare, Christine Korsgaard, Alan Gewirth, and Michael Smith.
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate is the second of the Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, set in Edinburgh, Scotland, and featuring the protagonist Isabel Dalhousie. It was first published in 2005, and is the sequel to The Sunday Philosophy Club.
Keeping the Moon is a young adult novel by author Sarah Dessen. It is her third novel and was first published in 1999.
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is a work of philosophy by Charles Taylor, published in 1989 by Harvard University Press. It is an attempt to articulate and to write a history of the "modern identity".
Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..
The Sovereignty of Good is a book of moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1970, it comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures. Murdoch argued against the prevailing consensus in moral philosophy, proposing instead a Platonist approach. The Sovereignty of Good is Murdoch's best known philosophy book.
Talking of the Dead was the fourth novel published in 1996 by British author Helen Dunmore, a "chilling tie of sibling rivalry and sudden infant death", and has been described as one of the best novels in the 1990s. It was her first novel to be published in the United States.