2024.08.11 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Frans Svensson, Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism, Routledge, 2024, 182pp., $124.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781032750712.
Reviewed by Matthew J. Kisner, University of South Carolina
Frans Svensson’s Descartes’s Moral Perfectionism is a welcome addition to a topic that deserves greater attention. The book makes significant contributions to our understanding of Descartes’s ethics, which should be of interest to Descartes scholars of all stripes, as Descartes’s work on ethics was not a side project, but rather integrated into his comprehensive philosophical system. While the book engages with the scholarly literature, it is also sufficiently accessible, direct, and brief to serve as an introduction to Descartes’s ethics for the uninitiated. As the title indicates, the book’s thesis is that Descartes should be categorized as a kind of moral perfectionist. While Svensson sometimes makes use of categories and concepts from contemporary ethical theory, the book is focused on understanding Descartes rather than bringing Descartes’s…
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