Philosophy and Political Engagement

Philosophy and Political Engagement PDF Author: Allyn Fives
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137445874
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Do philosophers have a responsibility to their society that is distinct from their responsibility to it as citizens? This edited volume explores both what type of contribution philosophy can make and what type of reasoning is appropriate when addressing public matters now. These questions are posed by leading international scholars working in the fields of moral and political philosophy. Each contribution also investigates the central issue of how to combine critical, rational analysis with a commitment to politically relevant public engagement. The contributions to this volume analyse issues raised in practical ethics, including abortion, embryology, and assisted suicide. They consider the role of ethical commitment in the philosophical analysis of contemporary political issues, and engage with matters of public policy such as poverty, the arts, meaningful work, as well as the evidence base for policy. They also examine the normative legitimacy of power, including the use of violence.

Philosophy and Political Engagement

Philosophy and Political Engagement PDF Author: Allyn Fives
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137445874
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book

Book Description
Do philosophers have a responsibility to their society that is distinct from their responsibility to it as citizens? This edited volume explores both what type of contribution philosophy can make and what type of reasoning is appropriate when addressing public matters now. These questions are posed by leading international scholars working in the fields of moral and political philosophy. Each contribution also investigates the central issue of how to combine critical, rational analysis with a commitment to politically relevant public engagement. The contributions to this volume analyse issues raised in practical ethics, including abortion, embryology, and assisted suicide. They consider the role of ethical commitment in the philosophical analysis of contemporary political issues, and engage with matters of public policy such as poverty, the arts, meaningful work, as well as the evidence base for policy. They also examine the normative legitimacy of power, including the use of violence.

Foundations of Civic Engagement

Foundations of Civic Engagement PDF Author: Ralph D. Ellis
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 1461681421
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Foundations of Civic Engagement is a comprehensive survey and reassessment of the entire field of social and political philosophy. Suitable for use as a primary text for courses on political thought, this book explores the basic arguments of the most important historical and contemporary figures and offers a thematic critique and integration of these philosophies. This dynamic book includes in-depth discussions of Ancient Greek, modern and contemporary theories of communitarianism, social contract, feminism, classical liberal rights-based approaches, African American philosophy, postmodernism, Marxism, critical theory, and theories of communicative actions (e.g. Habermas). Throughout philosophical history, there is a tension between social development of the political person—as in personalist, communitarian, feminist, postmodern, and Continental thought—and the abstract contractual principles needed for impartial justice and freedom of conscience. This chasm can be bridged to some extent by combining ideal contractualism with the tools of feminist theory, discourse ethics, and critical theory. Foundations of Civic Engagement evaluates these tensions, as well as the criticisms and response to criticism for each theory, in order to promote open dialogue, analysis, and a realistic assessment of each philosophy.

Health and Political Engagement

Health and Political Engagement PDF Author: Mikko Mattila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317202112
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Social scientists have only recently begun to explore the link between health and political engagement. Understanding this relationship is vitally important from both a scholarly and a policy-making perspective. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive account of health and political engagement. Using both individual-level and country-level data drawn from the European Social Survey, World Values Survey and new Finnish survey data, it provides an extensive analysis of how health and political engagement are connected. It measures the impact of various health factors on a wide range of forms of political engagement and attitudes and helps shed light on the mechanisms behind the interaction between health and political engagement. This text is of key interest scholars, students and policy-makers in health, politics, and democracy, and more broadly in the social and health and medical sciences.

The Political Philosophy of Needs

The Political Philosophy of Needs PDF Author: Lawrence A. Hamilton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139436988
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This ambitious and lively book argues for a rehabilitation of the concept of 'human needs' as central to politics and political theory. Contemporary political philosophy has focused on issues of justice and welfare to the exclusion of the important issues of political participation, democratic sovereignty, and the satisfaction of human needs, and this has had a deleterious effect on political practice. Lawrence Hamilton develops a compelling positive conception of human needs: the evaluation of needs must be located within a more general analysis of institutions, but can in turn help to justify forms of coercive authority that are directed toward the transformation of political and social institutions and practices. His argument is animated throughout by provocative and original discussions of topics such as autonomy, recognition, rights, civil society, liberalism and democracy, and will interest a wide range of readers in political and social philosophy, political theory, law, development and policy.

Imagining the Possible

Imagining the Possible PDF Author: Stephen Eric Bronner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136779183
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Jean-Paul Sartre originally made the term engagement a part of the existentialist vocabulary following WWII. It imples the responsibility of intervening in social or political conflicts in the hope of fostering freedom. Imagining the Possible opens different windows upon this particular engagement.

The Political is Political

The Political is Political PDF Author: Lorna Finlayson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783482885
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Nobody should really have to point out that political philosophy is political. Yet in this highly original and provocative book Lorna Finlayson argues that in fact it is necessary to do so. Offering a critique of mainstream liberal political philosophy through close, critical engagement with a series of specific debates and arguments, Finlayson analyzes the way in which apparently neutral methodological devices such as “charitable interpretation” and “constructive criticism” function so as to protect against challenges to the status quo. At each stage, Finlayson demonstrates that political philosophy is suffering from a complex process of “de-politicization.” Even in cases where it appears that the dominant framework of liberal political philosophy is being strongly challenged—as, for example, in the case of the ‘realist’ critique of “ideal theory”—this book argues that the debate is set up in such a way as to impose strict limits on the kind of dissent that is possible. Only by dragging these hidden presuppositions into the foreground can we arrive at a clear-eyed appreciation of such debates, and perhaps look beyond the artificially constricted landscape in which they seek to confine us.

What Would Socrates Do?

What Would Socrates Do? PDF Author: Joel Alden Schlosser
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107067421
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This book challenges popular modern views of Socrates by examining the political significance of his activity in ancient Athens.

The Spectrum of Political Engagement

The Spectrum of Political Engagement PDF Author: David L. Schalk
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400870992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Why do artists, poets, philosophers, writers, and others who are usually classified as intellectuals leave the ivory tower to "dirty their hands" in the political arena? In an effort to illuminate the intellectual's struggle to come to grips with the issues raised by political involvement, David Schalk examines the life and thought of five intellectuels engagés in France during the period between 1920 and 1945. From communist to fascist, these figures—Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Mounier, Julien Benda, and Robert Brasillach—cover the full political spectrum, and Professor Schalk studies their diverse reactions to the social, political, and economic tensions of the interwar period. Broadly defining "engagement" as political involvement that is voluntary, conscious, and freely chosen, usually by intellectuals, the author poses the intellectual's dilemma in the following terms: "When we are engagé," he writes, "we fear that we are debasing our highest values; when we are not, we worry that we have become, in Paul Nizan's trenchant phrase, mere chiens de garde [watchdogs]." He then investigates the origins and the popularization of the concept of engagement in the early 1930s, the arguments used to denounce it and to defend it, its different manifestations, and finally its effects on the socio-political actuality of the world. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy

Paul Ricoeur and the Task of Political Philosophy PDF Author: Greg S. Johnson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 073916774X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This book discusses the political philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. More precisely, it offers a sustained engagement with Ricoeur’s political thought in a way that demonstrates both the significance of the political in his own thinking throughout his career, and how Ricoeur’s understanding of the political offers something valuable to current discussions in political philosophy. A second goal is to begin to fill a gap in Ricoeur studies and situate his work on political ethics more fully in contemporary discussions about political thought. In this way, Ricoeur can be seen as a figure pertinent to recent trends in political philosophy that make political thinking more realistic to the conditions for political life. The various essays in the book move along intersecting but different trajectories. First, as some of these essays attest, the concept of the political is a pervasive theme that runs throughout Ricoeur’s corpus. In this way a theme throughout the book examines this notion of the political, as well as how it relates to his more well-known work in other areas. Second, and related, the historical understanding of perennial issues in political philosophy are most often updated by those standing in the lineage of those who have come before. As such, Ricoeur’s hermeneutical orientation has moved him to engage contemporaries who attempt to “think forward” in various ways this tradition for current situations. Unlike most who engage in political thought, Ricoeur goes where others dare not, namely, to those who appear to be opponents but, as he shows, offer perspectives worth more consideration in the name of the best of political thinking. In this light, Ricoeur’s hermeneutical orientation is again a unique framework for understanding the nature of political engagement, an orientation in what follows that highlights the ways that Ricoeur and a Ricoeurian perspective cross philosophical orientations to develop a unique understanding of political thought that is different.

In the Shadow of Justice

In the Shadow of Justice PDF Author: Katrina Forrester
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216754
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--