Shaping the Language of Modern European Ethics

Abstract

The paper analyzes the process of shaping of terminology that was to become the core of modern ethical vocabulary. From an attentive study of the endeavors of early modern philosophers to find a term for designating the subject of ethics, i. e. the morals, it results that the formation of the morals vocabulary must be regarded as the very process of self-identification of moral philosophy in the course of which the moral phenomenon attained a conceptual form. Hence the importance of an enquiry into the lexicological side of this process, which seems to be an indispensable precondition of its philosophic understanding.