The Spirit That We Sought: Essays on Ethics and Poetics for Today.

In light of previous volumes in this series about some of the essential backgrounds in which we need to do ethics and poetics today, this volume presents further essays for critical discussion about the boundaries of philosophical ethics. The general unifying proposal here, declined in various interconnected ways, is that articulating the limits of philosophical ethics in our own times requires catching renewed and sustained sightings of what Kant in Königsberg in 1790 called a “negative sublime” and what Hegel in Jena in 1801 called a “negative absolute.” Very roughly put, that negative absolute and sublime is the incomprehensible vastness of innocent suffering and the overwhelming powers of evil. In the face of such immense negatives and with the help of both ethical and aesthetic reflections, the different essays here try to bring into sharper focus metaphysical considerations that might not improperly be taken as part of our common task to rearticulate the appropriate aims and nature of philosophical ethics itself.

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Peter McCormick. The Spirit That We Sought: Essays on Ethics and Poetics for Today. Lviv: Ukrainian Catholic University, 2022. – 324 p. ISBN 978-617-7637-34-8