Virtue and Taste

These essays on aesthetics, ethics and politics have been collected in memory of Flint Schier, a philosopher of exceptional promise who died in 1988 at the age of 34. They include two unpublished essays by Schier, one of them dealing with the relationship between autonomy and negative liberty, a fundamental question in the theory of liberalism, the other with the nature of aesthetic representation. The other essays follow up these and related themes. A number of them address in various ways the subtle interaction between the aesthetic, the ethical and the political, considered as dimensions of personal and civil life in a liberal culture. Others deal directly with the notions of fiction and representation. The contributors are all well-known for their work in moral, aesthetic and political theory.