Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus Professor Publishes Book on Sentimentalism in Moral Philosophy
- Joseph Filonowicz authors new publication from Cambridge University Press -

Brooklyn, N.Y. - How do our feelings for others shape our attitudes and conduct? Is morality more about reason or emotion? Joseph Duke Filonowicz, professor of philosophy at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Campus, addresses these and other questions in his new book, "Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life."

Published by Cambridge University Press, the professor’s treatise takes the reader on an engaging, informative tour of some of the key issues in philosophical ethics. This first book-length treatment of sentimentalism as a historical tradition in moral philosophy explores the ideas of David Hume, Adam Smith and other 18th-Century British sentimentalists. In contrast to the rationalistic character of contemporary ethics, the sentimentalists argued that it is our feelings and not our reason that determine how we judge what is good or bad, right or wrong, and how we choose to act towards our fellow human beings.

"My study is an attempt to retell the story of ethical sentimentalism in a new, more logical manner – a kind of pilgrimage, backward in time, to the origin of the sentimental school and a return to ethics in the present day," said Filonowicz. He draws on contemporary sociology and evolutionary biology as well as present-day moral theory to examine and defend the sentimentalist view and to challenge the character of ethics today. His book is intended for members of the general public as well as academia.

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Posted: January 22, 2009