Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry [antikvár]

PrefaceAnyone invited to deliver a set of Gilford Lectures at Edinburgh University is bound to tcel daunted by the standards set by his or her predecessors. The great honor conferred by the GifFord Committee is a very welcome burden, hut nonetheless a burden. I was and am therefore immensely grateful both to the members of that committee and to many others for the ways in which they did so very much to lighten that burden by their large academic and social hospitality. I owe my warmest thanks to the Reverend Professor Duncan B. Forrester for assistance of more kinds than I can mention. While I was giving the lectures, I was also a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and I am deeply indebted to Professor Peter Jones, the director of the Institute and to the Institute for his and its generosity.During the lectures in April and May, 1988, a seminar was held at New College and the members of that seminar contributed substantially to the lectures by the pertinacity of their questioning. Often enough I would come away from a seminar knowing that I had to rewrite some passage in a lecture yet to come or to rethink something that I had already said. To all the members of that seminar I give my thanks, especially to Barry Barnes for the exercise of his outstanding ability to give to critical discussion a constructive direction.During 1988-89 I was the Henry R. Luce Jr. Visiting Scholar at the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale Universit)'. One of the duties of a Visiting Scholar is to conduct a faculty seminar, and I used this opportunity to have the text of my GifFord Lectures subjected to further criticism. It was a privilege to be put to the question in this way and I am all too conscious of the inadequacy of my responses both in the seminar and in the resulting final version of the lectures. So much remains to be done. I am peculiarly in the