Paradigms and Perspectives on Value and Reality

Book excerpt: In Paradigms and Perspectives on Value and Reality, one encounters a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to the study of timeless questions relating to the human condition. In the book, the reader will encounter the fundamental questions of what the nature of reality is, how one can come to know this, and what our moral obligations are as human beings. The reader will learn from the collected insights of philosophy, religion, science, and psychology, and from diverse cultural perspectives both eastern and western in considering these universal human questions. In living ethical lives, one would like to know both how to act in order to act morally, and also how it is that one could have insight into the foundations of morality. The first question concerns the content of humans’ moral duties, the second concerns the underlying basis for those duties. In this text, one encounters a pluralistic approach to examining both questions and learns much from the interaction between western and eastern methods of ethical inquiry. Another vital aspect of human life that spans across time, culture, and tradition is curiosity about the world around us, humans’ place in it, and how it is that one might form a coherent picture of both. Paradigms and Perspectives on Value and Reality explores this topic in depth and from a variety of cross cultural perspectives. The volume concludes with a final section containing two essays devoted to the discussion of how religion and culture inform current theories of value and reality.