Foundations of a Science of Morality

Introduction

Ossowska published the book in 1947, soon after the war, as the programme of a discipline she had been working towards since the 1930s. It asks what a science of morality could be that describes rather than prescribes. She separates the normative ethics of philosophers from the study of moral facts and outlines three branches of the latter: an analysis of moral concepts and judgements in the manner of the Lwów–Warsaw School, a psychology of moral motives and attitudes, and a sociology of morals that relates norms to groups, classes and historical conditions. The book takes up earlier projects of a descriptive science of mores, such as that of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the Durkheim school, and examines their methods. It guided her later studies of moral types.

More works by Maria Ossowska

• 1956Bourgeois Morality