Dragan Pavlovic, The Starry Heavens and The Moral Law, or On what IS, what is Good, and What is Beautiful, Philosophical Essays on Facts and on Values. Published by Dialogue, Paris and Čigoja štampa, Belgrade, 2020.
I included here one assay on facts – a variant of representational realism (“The starry heavens above me”, as Kant stated it), which is, at first, an extended discussion of Boscovich, Kant and Hegel’s writings on physical reality. To avoid the text becoming unreadable, I avoided giving many introductory explanations. However, the audience to which the book is addressed most likely is acquainted with the basic ideas of those philosophers. The essays on values that follow (“Moral law within me”, again a citation from Kant) concern here, on one hand, social justice, and on the other hand, ethics as observed by the individuals. Finally, I included a chapter on aesthetics, as the most private, individual sphere of the value system of human beings. So I maintain that the world is an ensemble of interactions of the entities that further nature does not exist for us. Immanuel Kant named that concept noumenon; this is just a name but in my opinion adequate one. We, of course, make a distinction between good and bad and in our human interactions, I propose that the most important good is justice, particularly social justice. What justice itself is, the general meaning of justice, I do not discuss since it exists probably only as applied to something, namely to social relations, some of which I describe. It is maintained also that we are aware of what good or bad is just in the field of our concerns. The term of concerns I take in the largest sense possible. This is how I tried to avoid the tautology of the offered explanation and place the explanation in the centre of the actor – a human being. This same logic I think applies to the most intimate, most individual intentions of us, the esthetic values, which I place as closest possible to human “I” that determines all aesthetic values and in so doing includes complete imaginable freedom for Men. This makes the aesthetic value escape all rigid definitions. This is not to say that aesthetic values are relative. On the contrary, I think that it is very clear what is beauty, what is good and what is less good. Dragan Pavlovic lives in Paris, France while he is simultaneously engaged as Adjunct Professor of Anesthesiology, Dept. of Anesthesia, Pain Management and Perioperative Medicine, Dalhousie University, in Halifax., Halifax, NS, B3H 2Y9, Canada.
