Author: Jonathan Wolff
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691149003
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Previously unpublished writings from one of the most important political philosophers of recent times G. A. Cohen was one of the leading political philosophers of recent times. He first came to wide attention in 1978 with the prize-winning book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In subsequent decades his published writings largely turned away from the history of philosophy, focusing instead on equality, freedom, and justice. However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures. Starting with a chapter centered on Plato, but also discussing the pre-Socratics as well as Aristotle, the book moves to social contract theory as discussed by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and then continues with chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book also contains some previously published but uncollected papers on Marx, Hobbes, and Kant, among other figures. The collection concludes with a memoir of Cohen written by the volume editor, Jonathan Wolff, who was a student of Cohen's. A hallmark of the lectures is Cohen's engagement with the thinkers he discusses. Rather than simply trying to render their thought accessible to the modern reader, he tests whether their arguments and positions are clear, sound, and free from contradiction. Throughout, he homes in on central issues and provides fresh approaches to the philosophers he examines. Ultimately, these lectures teach us not only about some of the great thinkers in the history of moral and political philosophy, but also about one of the great thinkers of our time: Cohen himself.
Author: John Rawls
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674042565
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Constantly revised and refined over three decades, Rawls's lectures on various historical figures reflect his developing and changing views on the history of liberalism and democracy. With its careful analyses of the doctrine of the social contract, utilitarianism, and socialism, this volume has a critical place in the traditions it expounds.
Author: William Paley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
Author: William Whewell
Publisher: London : J.W. Parker ; Cambridge : J. Deighton
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
Author: Jeffrey Bercuson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317815548
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
In this book, Jeffrey Bercuson presents the immense, and yet for the most part unrecognized, influences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on John Rawls, the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. While the well-documented influence of Immanuel Kant on Rawls is deep and profound, Kantian features and interpretation of justice as fairness do not tell the whole story about that doctrine. Drawing on Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy and his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Bercuson presents the reader with a more nuanced, accurate account of the moral and political philosophy of Rawls in light of these under-appreciated influences. This new, richer image of Rawls’s political philosophy shows that Rawls’s notion of reasonableness – his notion of the kind and extent of our obligations to those fellows with whom we are engaged in social cooperation – is conspicuously more demanding, and therefore more attractive, than most interpreters and critics assume. Rawls turns to Rousseau and to Hegel, both of whom provide attractive images of engaged citizenship worthy of emulation. Written accessibly, and contributing to key contemporary debates of global justice, this book will be read by scholars within the fields of social and political theory, ethics, and philosophy.
Author: Ian Shapiro
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300189753
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.
Author: Arthur Ripstein
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674054512
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant’s thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant’s political philosophy. Ripstein shows that Kant’s thought is organized around two central claims: first, that legal institutions are not simply responses to human limitations or circumstances; indeed the requirements of justice can be articulated without recourse to views about human inclinations and vulnerabilities. Second, Kant argues for a distinctive moral principle, which restricts the legitimate use of force to the creation of a system of equal freedom. Ripstein’s description of the unity and philosophical plausibility of this dimension of Kant’s thought will be a revelation to political and legal scholars. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant’s ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant’s views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today. Ripstein defends the idea of equal freedom by examining several substantive areas of law—private rights, constitutional law, police powers, and punishment—and by demonstrating the compelling advantages of the Kantian framework over competing approaches.
Author: Robert C. Bartlett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022639428X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
It was Nietzsche who first identified the similarities between the radical sophistry of antiquity and the contemporary relativism that has come to characterize modern thought. The anti-foundationalism of contemporary thought can be said to have been born with the Sophists, and, of all the Sophists who have come down to us, Protagoras is the most famous and challenging of them. Robert Bartlett s masterful book is the first to examine Plato s Protagoras and Theaetetus together to uncover what lies at the heart of Protagoras teaching, both its moral and political components and its theoretical and epistemological groundings. His superb exegesis of these two dialogues allows one to see more clearly the power of radical relativism: its strengths and its deficiencies. Bartlett notes that political philosophy has been supplanted in the modern era either by the study of the history of political philosophy or by relativism. Although "Understanding Political Philosophy and Sophistry" can certainly be taken as an example of the former, it is much more than that. It seeks to uncover what Socrates, in responding to that teaching, begins to reveal of his own understanding and characteristic activity. It helps us begin to understand, in other words, the phenomenon of philosophy, not just as a system of thought, but as Socrates lived it."
Author: Simone Weil
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521293334
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Derived from Weil's lectures, the collection presents a general introduction to philosophy, ranging widely over problems about perception, mind, language, and reasoning, as well as problems in moral and political philosophy.
Author: Stefano Bacin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107182859
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
A thorough study of why Kant developed the concept of autonomy, one of his central legacies for contemporary moral thought.
