Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

These remarks, which span the last eighteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, extend several of his well known themes from his so-called "later" writings. One such theme, which occurs as a unifying leitmotiv in this work, is that philosophical puzzlement arises from a failure to realize the indefiniteness and complexity of our concepts. Herein it takes the form of the claim that we have not one but several concepts of color. In fact, we have as many concepts of color as we (...) have different methods for determining sameness of color. "The indefiniteness in the concept of color lies, above all, in the indefiniteness of the concept of the sameness of colors, i.e., of the methods of comparing colors". E.g., when I say of two objects that they have the same color I could mean, among other things, that they visually appear to be similar or that their surfaces are painted with similarly tinted paints. Another prominent theme, which runs throughout all of his writings, both early and late, is the employment of a linguistic or grammatical theory of necessity for the purpose of refuting claims to have synthetic a priori knowledge. Herein it is phenomenology which is put in its place, its claims turning out to be only an "analysis of concepts that can neither agree with nor contradict physics". The indefiniteness in our concept of color helps spawn the illusion of such exalted knowledge, because it enables us to use a single sentence, on some occasions, to express a norm or convention of language and, on others, to report experience. "Sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning changes back and forth and they count now as expressions of norms, now as expressions of experience". Considerable space is devoted to showing that the sentence "A body cannot seem to be both white and transparent" is used in the former way. While Wittgenstein succeeds in saying many interesting and original things about color, his remarks do not give any further clarification to the underlying themes, such as the two above, which he deploys in this area.—R.M.G. (shrink)

An anthology of philosophical essays and abstracts ranging from Plato to C. D. Broad. The work includes specific discussions of the philosophy of science, religion, politics, and value, as well as discussions concerned with the more general issues of epistemology and metaphysics.--T. M. G.

This study presents an empirical investigation of the ethical perceptions of the future managers - Turkish university students majoring in the Business Administration and Industrial Engineering departments of selected public and private Turkish universities - with a special emphasis on gender. The perceptions of the university students pertaining to the business world, the behaviors of employees, and the factors leading to unethical behavior are analyzed. The statistically significant differences reveal that female students have more ethical perceptions about the Turkish business (...) climate, behavior of employees, and the ethicalness of the behavior of the employees in comparison with their male counterparts. (shrink)

This powerful, original, and tendentious book was written in 1940, published in Russia in 1965, and is now available in English. It suffers from many shortcomings--repetitiousness, oversimplification, the exclusion of material which fails to fit the author's thesis. It also inevitably reflects ignorance of scholarship since the thirties, which has tended to deny Rabelais' alleged agnosticism and nudged him closer to orthodoxy. But it represents nonetheless an important advance in the understanding of Rabelais' book, and defends provocatively an unfashionable theory (...) of the Renaissance. Bakhtin lays heaviest stress on his author's freedom to play with authorized symbols and solemn institutions in the spirit of the carnival, a spirit deriving from folk humor. The common folk of town and country delighted in improprieties, turned all serious values and structures upside down, dwelt subversively and coarsely on the "bodily lower stratum." Just as food enters the body and is eliminated, so all authorized solemnity enters Pantagruel and is turned into fun. This peasant laughter remains unafraid before age and death because it recognizes the simultaneous destruction and creation in all experience. The medieval hierarchical conception of the universe is replaced in Rabelais and in the entire Renaissance by a new horizontal perspective upon the individual in history. This new perspective fastens particularly upon the body and renders it good-humoredly grotesque. Bakhtin seriously underestimates the breadth of both Renaissance religious feeling and neo-Platonic speculation as well as the strength of medieval survivals. But specific readings of Rabelais' text are genuinely enlightening even when they distort or simplify his meaning.--T. M. G. (shrink)

Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, the author here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an ...

The papers in this collection, which were presented at the Third Conference of University Centers for Rational Alternatives, deal with the challenges to academic freedom resulting from the demand that universities take public stands on controversial social and political issues. The papers are grouped under three headings: "Objectivity and Indoctrination," "Ethics of Teaching," and "Ethics of Research." The first group of papers discusses the current trends toward the politicalization of the university and the use of the educational process to indoctrinate (...) rather than to seek and present the truth. The central issue in this discussion is whether teachers should temper their views to avoid clashes with society’s most cherished beliefs. Most of the contributors maintain that teachers can function effectively only if they pursue truth without compromise. The second group of papers deals with such disparate topics as the value of academic freedom, the need to have a detailed legal code for the university and the importance of teaching ethics in law schools. The main dispute in this section concerns the value of codifying the university’s common law. Robert Rosenzweig maintains that attempts at codification will waste large amounts of faculty time because the end product is unlikely to be sufficiently clear to avoid many of the disputes that would have arisen without the code. William Van Alstyne argues that attempts to codify a university’s rules might bring out latent differences of opinion that need to be confronted and, if possible, resolved. The papers in the third section consider whether any limitation should be placed on scientific research that could adversely affect the lives of individuals or groups. Most of the papers support the view that moral considerations limit what scientists should do in their search for knowledge. The papers in this collection, which are mostly three to six pages long, are too brief to allow detailed or probing analyses. Nonetheless, the arguments they contain, which deal with important, current issues, make some interesting and valuable points.—M.G. (shrink)

Most present-day philosophers know William Paley primarily as a defender of the argument from design and the author of the famous watch analogy. Professor LeMahieu argues that Paley’s philosophical and theological writings deserve more than the scant attention they now receive. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Paley’s books were held in such high esteem that several were required reading by students at Oxford and Cambridge; the Evidences of Christianity was kept on the Cambridge University examination list until 1920. His (...) books were deemed important not only because they presented forceful arguments in a lucid style, but also because they presented a unified and comprehensive philosophy that embodied many of the main beliefs of the Enlightenment in England. The cornerstone of Paley’s philosophy was the contention that scientific reasoning, i.e., inductive and analogical arguments, could be used to demonstrate God’s existence and nature. In Natural Theology, Paley offered inductive arguments for God’s existence; and in Evidences of Christianity, arguments of the same type were used to support revealed religion. Paley’s argument in support of Christianity was directed primarily at refuting Hume’s contention that those who claimed to have seen the biblical miracles were unreliable witnesses. In Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Paley again relied on inductive arguments along with his inductive proofs of God’s existence and nature to support a utilitarian moral position. Although LeMahieu presents a full account of Paley’s philosophy and its influence on subsequent nineteenth century thinkers, he does not neglect to point out some of that philosophy’s questionable arguments and assumptions. Despite many possible deficiencies in his arguments, however, Paley is one of the ablest defenders of religion and, at times, a shrewd philosopher. By presenting a coherent statement of Paley’s philosophy, LeMahieu has performed a worthwhile task. His book should inspire other philosophers to examine carefully Paley’s neglected treatises.—M.G. (shrink)

As the crime rate rises and attempts to rehabilitate criminals prove unsuccessful, attacks upon recent reforms in our handling of crime increase. In this book van den Haag offers both a theory of punishment which supports traditional penal policies and factual data which show the failure of recent reforms. van den Haag claims that the main purpose of a legal system is to preserve order but that not every system that does this is acceptable. Along with preserving order, a legal (...) system should also be retributively just, i.e., punish those and only those who deserve it, because only such a system will gain public support. Although van den Haag does not present an original thesis on the moral justification of punishment, he covers many important issues in a lucid fashion, argues forcefully for his views, and presents some new arguments. In his discussion of our legal system’s exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, he argues that such evidence should be admissible in court since the misconduct of the police is irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of the accused. If the police obtain evidence illegally, then they should be punished rather than society harmed by allowing the guilty to go free. In defending the death penalty, van den Haag contends that it is the opponents of the penalty’s effectiveness as a deterrent who have the burden of proof. Since, other things being equal, increasing the severity of the penalty decreases the incidence of various crimes, it must be assumed that the incidence of any crime can be decreased by increasing the severity of the punishment. Thus, without clear evidence to the contrary, the death penalty would have to be deemed likely to have a deterrent effect. The factual data presented by van den Haag is interesting and one recent experiment he discusses has produced particularly surprising results. This experiment on student cheating showed that the threat of punishment was effective in producing the desired behavior, but that exhortations to be honest were counterproductive.—M.G. (shrink)

The eight papers in this collection, which were delivered at the Fourth Annual Conference in Philosophy at the University of Georgia in February, 1971, deal with a variety of topics related to the current controversy about man’s use of his environment. The contributors, Eugene P. Odum, William T. Blackstone, Joel Feinberg, Charles Hartshorne, Walter O’Briant, Nicholas Rescher, Robert G. Burton, and Pete A. Y. Gunter, discuss such issues as overpopulation, man’s relation to nature, man’s attitude toward his environment, and the (...) proper role of technology in industrialized societies. Two especially interesting papers are Rescher’s "The Environmental Crisis and the Quality of Life" and Feinberg’s "The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations." Rescher believes that Americans can avoid bitter disappointment only by realizing that no significant improvement in the quality of their environment is possible. He is aware that this realization will be painful because it involves surrendering the deeply held convictions that the quality of our life will continually improve and that our technology can overcome any physical obstacles. Feinberg discusses some of the complex issues involved in deciding whether people are obligated to leave a satisfactory environment for those who will come in the future. He contends that there is no obligation to add additional people; but, insofar as it is known that there will be future generations, we are obligated to consider their interests. The book has a helpful introduction by the editor which summarizes the position and arguments of each contributor.—M.G. (shrink)

Although a number of anthologies on the philosophy of punishment have been published in recent years, the inclusion of a number of important but rarely reprinted articles makes this volume a valuable addition to the field. Included are such historically important figures as Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and St. Thomas Aquinas; such rarely included figures as G. B. Shaw, Samuel Butler and Karl Marx; the important but ignored Mill-Gilpin controversy on capital punishment; and the hitherto nearly inaccessible paper by Richard Wasserstrom, (...) "Why Punish the Guilty?" Along with these fresh selections are numerous influential, widely-reprinted classical and contemporary essays. The selections are grouped into five sections, the largest of which, constituting nearly half the text, deals with the justification of punishment. The various justificatory theories are classified as teleological, retributivist, and teleological retributivist. The latter theory, not clearly defined by the editor, is represented by W. D. Ross, H. L. A. Hart, J. D. Mabbott, and K. G. Armstrong, who relate the teleological and retributivist elements in their theories in quite different ways. A section entitled "Alternatives to Punishment" provides selections which question the justice of punishment, its deterrent effect and the success of our present penal system. The other sections deal with the strict liability issue, the concept of punishment and the death penalty. Although containing good selections, the sections dealing with the latter two topics, including four and three articles respectively, are quite short. There are long bibliographies for each section and an introductory article by Professor Ezorsky examining the various justifications offered for punishment and arguing for a teleological retributivist theory.—M.G. (shrink)

This volume, designed to bring together new analyses of moral skepticism, consists of papers by Professors William Frankena, Marcus Singer and Antony Flew and a long introduction by the editor which describes the central issues and discusses each of the papers. In his paper, "The Principles of Morality," Frankena contends that underlying many of our ordinary moral expressions is the implicit belief in an absolute moral action-guide, i.e., an action-guide which all those who are fully rational within the moral point (...) of view would acknowledge. Although Frankena does not discuss in this paper the crucial and perplexing problems of whether all those taking the moral point of view must accept the same principles and whether there is an irreducible plurality of moral points of view, he does discuss at length H. D. Aiken’s rejection of moral absolutism in favor of moral autonomy and the differences between his theory and R. Firth’s Ideal Observer Theory. In "Moral Skepticism," Singer carefully defines his topic and classifies its major variants, three of which—personal subjectivism, social subjectivism and emotivism—he criticizes in detail. Although Singer does not present new arguments against the various forms of moral skepticism, he provides the valuable service of organizing clearly and stating precisely the major difficulties. The concluding paper by Flew, "Must Morality Pay? or What Socrates Should Have Said to Thrasymachus," seems out of place in this collection since it neither defends an absolute position nor attacks a variety of skepticism. Flew argues that Socrates’ attempt to prove that the life of justice is always in one’s interest is misguided, since, in the real world, morality often demands that an individual sacrifice his good for the good of others. What Socrates should have argued, according to Flew, is that the choice of the moral life rather than the prudent one cannot be deemed to be either rational or irrational because for such a choice, the issue of rationality arises only in connection with the coherence of our plans and purposes or the internal consistency of our preferences.—M. G. (shrink)

This volume is the second part of the Gifford Lectures devoted to the topic, "The Phenomenon of Mind." Like the first part, entitled The Nature of Mind, this part consists of two papers by each of the four authors, discussions of each paper by the authors, and answers to questions from the audience. Since frequent references are made to papers published in the first part, this volume is best read after the prior one. The authors begin this part by acknowledging (...) their differing views about the meaning of the term "mind;" these views are that "mind" refers to the ability to speak and understand a natural language, rationality and moral autonomy, the ability to select and modify goals, and the ability to devise plans and carry out certain intellectual procedures. Because of their different views on the nature of mind, the papers in this volume, which are devoted to the development of mind in the individual and the species, tend to lack cohesion. Despite this lack, the papers raise a number of interesting points on such issues as the development of the mind in the process of evolution the significance of Chomsky’s views of language for our concept of mind, the difference between the computer’s capacities and man’s, and the significance of having a mind for certain theological views. The inclusion in the text of the discussion sessions following each paper and the sessions devoted entirely to answering questions from the audience is valuable because it helps the reader to recognize and focus upon those issues on which the authors disagree.—M.G. (shrink)

Russell tries to give an account of influences that have shaped his philosophy, though there is no mention of the development of his ethical or social views. The last chapter is devoted to the replies to criticisms. As might be expected, a most readable book.--M. G.

Although important philosophers have questioned the moral defensibility of our treatment of animals, the topic has never had a significant place in ethical theory. By bringing together papers by authors with diverse views, this anthology focuses attention on the topic which, primarily due to the writings of Peter Singer, has received increasing study in recent years. According to Singer, the major moral theories offer arbitrary bases for giving preference to humans, and so they cannot be used to justify the widespread (...) beliefs that eating and experimenting upon animals are morally acceptable practices. Insofar as humans, regardless of rational or physical capacity, are deemed worthy of equal consideration, there is no good reason to withhold such consideration from animals. The first of the four sections into which the readings are divided describes the brutal treatment animals often receive from people. The second section provides a variety of opinions on the difference between men and animals ranging from Descartes’ claim that animals are mere automatons to Darwin’s claim that there is no fundamental difference between the mental faculties of men and higher mammals. The third section considers whether any of the supposed differences between men and animals can justify different treatment. The main conflict here is between those who contend that we have duties only to free or rational beings and those who, like Singer, contend that we have the duty to heed the interests of all sentient beings. The fourth section examines the nature of rights and whether animals have them. Some writers contend that animals have the right not only to life and happiness but also to liberty and property. Those unfamiliar with the heretofore neglected problem of our treatment of animals will find the readings in this collection valuable and provocative.—M.G. (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing in front of me, which looks to me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a (...) perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

An interesting book by a theoretical physicist. M. Mercier is on the whole a neo-platonist with his postulation that "Being" is fundamentally transcendent and infinite. The book also contains very illuminating insights on knowledge and the relation of knowledge to "Being."--M. G.

Bodily experience in dreams should be considered illusory to the extent that they cannot be satisfactorily explained or fruitfully investigated by appealing to brain activity alone; rather, to wholly understand the unique phenomenology of embodied selfhood in dreams, one must understand how the brain processes real-body inputs to produce the phenomenology of embodied selfhood in dreams, and why the brain responds the way it does to external stimuli during sleep.

The views of three prominent eighteenth-century moral philosophers, Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Butler, and David Hume, are critically examined in this book. Professor Roberts believes that a careful analysis of these empiricist philosophers’ views can serve as a prolegomenon to an adequate understanding of benevolence. The nature of benevolence and its role in motivating moral actions was a crucial issue in eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Some philosophers who preceded Hutcheson denied that only feelings motivated actions; and others, who defended the efficacy of (...) feelings, claimed that, since benevolent actions ultimately derived from self-interested motives, morality rested on self-interest. Though differing on important points, Hutcheson and Hume both held that feelings motivate actions and that benevolence, not self-interest, is the source of morality. Because Butler’s position on these issues is unclear, Roberts presents the conflicting presentations of Butler’s major expositors along with his own interpretation. He argues that Butler, unlike Hutcheson and Hume, believed that the mere recognition of one’s duty could motivate one to do it. In discussing Hume, Roberts asserts that despite the oft-quoted statement that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions," Hume emphasizes the use of reason in the role that imagination plays in the operation of sympathy. In the concluding section, Roberts points out the similarities, weaknesses and metaphysical presuppositions of the three philosophers. This book is clearly written and presents a valuable analysis of both the difficulties and strengths in the eighteenth-century accounts of benevolence.—M.G. (shrink)

Professor Nathan’s goals in this short work are to describe the various senses of "just," to classify the ways in which the moral assessments of actions depend on conception of justice, to explain the logical and psychological factors which affect the popularity of various views of justice, and to explore the political implications of egalitarianism. He contends that there can be as many senses of "just" as there are standards which can be intelligibly used for deciding what makes one state (...) of affairs more valuable than another. For example, in deciding which punishment is appropriate for a crime, an indefinite number of criteria can be used, and, so, a punishment may be just in some senses and unjust in others. The moralist’s task is to establish the sense of justice that is proper to use in a given circumstance. Although Nathan does not defend any view of justice, he does criticize several historically important views. He contends that retributive or desert-dependent views of justice lead to inconsistent results or attach importance to emotionally irrelevant considerations. The final chapter distinguishes various egalitarian views and traces some of the implications of these views for a moral assessment of capitalism. An appendix, which was written prior to the publication of John Rawls’ recent influential book, provides a short analysis of Rawls’ theory of justice. Although Professor Nathan makes a number of valuable distinctions, his book is far too concise and would have benefited from the use of more examples and the elimination of some of his specially devised jargon.—M.G. (shrink)

This short book is designed to introduce the reader to normative ethics and to argue that a modified version of Ross’s theory is the most defensible moral position. As an introductory text, it has the virtue of being entertainingly written and of providing analyses of such popular topics as sexual morality, racial discrimination, and the sanctity of life. In some sections, however, the material is presented so concisely that students will have difficulty understanding it. For example, the ten pages devoted (...) to explaining and refuting several variants of utilitarianism are insufficient to provide an adequate grasp of the issues. Despite its brevity and introductory character, the book provides some fresh arguments that should interest philosophers. One such argument is the defense of Revised Ranked Ross Rules, a position which the author contends is closest to our common moral convictions. This modification of Ross’s position ranks various rules in the order of their importance and, as a result, supposedly is a better moral guide than Ross’s non-ordered set of rules. One criticism often raised against Ross’s position, which seems equally appropriate to Purtill’s, is that the application of the rules requires intuitive moral appraisals; although Purtill’s rules have an initial ranking, no mechanical application of them is possible since an act called for by the highest ranked rule might not produce the most good. Purtill acknowledges that his initial ranking does not preclude the need to decide which rule should be followed in a particular situation, but he denies that this type of decision requires any form of intuition. In a discussion that should be developed in some future work, he claims that basic human wants and interests provide an objective basis for those decisions.—M.G. (shrink)

This book examines some of the main problems involved in defining morality. Smith concedes that he cannot provide a fully satisfactory definition, but he believes that he can provide both a partial delimitation of the concept and a refutation of several related popular definitions. Since morality has a variety of meanings in ordinary usage, Smith offers a stipulative definition based on characteristics that he believes to be conceptually the most central. He states, "My focus will not be wholly arbitrary; I (...) will be guided partially by usage in the social sciences and partially by usage that is quite prevalent in good ordinary discourse." The stipulative definition that Smith offers in the first half of his book is of little value, however, because it places almost every code of conduct, including personal ethical egoism, within the sphere of morality. In the second half of the book, Smith attacks the view that reference to social harmony or welfare is necessary in any adequate definition of morality. After tracing the main reasons why morality is so often considered a device for promoting social welfare, Smith distinguishes several variants of the social welfare definition and presents a battery of clearly stated arguments against each. Even though Smith has provided only a partial analysis of the concept of morality, his clarification of the issues involved in formulating a satisfactory definition and his attack on the contention that morality is necessarily concerned with the welfare of others are useful.—M.G. (shrink)

This booklet contains Marx's review of the writings of Dr. Bruno Bauer, a contemporary theologian and social philosopher, on "the Jewish question." Marx identifies Judaism with usury and exploitation of the masses, as do those who, according to Runes in his introduction, "find in Jew-hatred a compensative way of living out the envies of their drab existences."--M. G.

This short study attempts to demonstrate the importance for Rabelais's thought and art of the "Platonic-Hermetic" current in antique and Renaissance intellectual history. The demonstration is weakened by the author's failure to sketch a history of this tradition, and one is left to gather from intermittent allusions and from footnotes whom he considers its principle spokesmen and what he considers its main tenets and spokesmen to be. According to Masters, Rabelais's writing is grounded in a Platonic dialectic which plays with (...) the tensions between reality and appearance, intellect and matter, soul and body, God and man. The presence of the divine in human affairs is manifested by such images as the androgyne and the pantagruelion. The recurrent Rabelaisian image of drinking can be understood on several levels. In its most literal sense, it points to the pleasure of festive conviviality. At a higher level, it involves the enlightened exchange of ideas, and at the highest, evoked in the episode of the Dive Bouteille, drinking suggests the acquisition of self-knowledge and, with self-knowledge, all other knowledge proper to the human mind. The Hermetic sciences can lead man in three directions: downward to the black arts; outward toward a salutary investigation of the world; or finally upward to an "intuitive dialectic" and a mystical union with the godhead. Although Masters' interpretations of specific images and episodes sometimes lack tact, his erudition should enhance the book's interest both for intellectual historians and Rabelaisian specialists.--T. M. G. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Hume’s theory of pride and the ‘remarkable mechanism’ of sympathy. In the first part of the paper I outline the ways in which Hume’s theory can accommodate the sense in which the passions are directed on things or possess intentionality while still holding to his view that passions are simple feelings. In the second part of the paper I consider a problem internal to Hume’s account of pride which arises in his discussion of the love (...) of fame and the functioning of sympathy; I explain how the tensions can be reconciled by recognising that Hume’s theory of sympathy is more nuanced than has commonly been recognized. In the third part I turn back to the evaluation of Hume’s theory of pride and argue that while it is unfair to complain that Hume does not make self-evaluation a central component of pride, Hume’s treatment of the idea of self in his theory of the passions is inadequate because he can make no proper room for the phenomenon of vicarious pride. (shrink)

A brief summary of ancient thinkers who contribute to a theory of the physical universe, ranging from Anaximander to Proclus, with a major emphasis on pre-Aristotelian thought. Included in the work are many well-chosen abstracts of primary sources, such as Hippocrates' "On the Sacred Disease" and Parmenides' "On Nature." De Santillana presents a lively account of his materials, together with helpful illustrations. There is a rather insensitive portrayal of Aristotle as a mere synopticist of earlier theories and as primarily concerned (...) with "a tidiness of words."--T. M. G. (shrink)

_Zettel, _ an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

Critics of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy argue that Arendt fails to address the most important problem of political judgment, namely, validity. This essay shows that Arendt does indeed have an answer to the problem that preoccupies her critics, with one important caveat: she does not think that validity is the all-important problem of political judgment--the affirmation of human freedom is.

This essay examines the significantly different approaches of John Rawls and Hannah Arendt to the problem of judgment in democratic theory and practice.