Since the very beginning, Confucianism has been troubled by a serious gap between its political ideals and the reality of societal circumstances. Contemporary Confucians must develop a viable method of governance that can retain the spirit of the Confucian ideal while tackling problems arising from nonideal modern situations. The best way to meet this challenge, Joseph Chan argues, is to adopt liberal democratic institutions that are shaped by the Confucian conception of the good rather than the liberal conception of (...) the right.Confucian Perfectionism examines and reconstructs both Confucian political thought and liberal democratic institutions, blending them to form a new Confucian political philosophy. Chan decouples liberal democratic institutions from their popular liberal philosophical foundations in fundamental moral rights, such as popular sovereignty, political equality, and individual sovereignty. Instead, he grounds them on Confucian principles and redefines their roles and functions, thus mixing Confucianism with liberal democratic institutions in a way that strengthens both. Then he explores the implications of this new yet traditional political philosophy for fundamental issues in modern politics, including authority, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and social justice.Confucian Perfectionism critically reconfigures the Confucian political philosophy of the classical period for the contemporary era. (shrink)

Political institutions can be transparent or secret. If they are transparent, then we have access to information about how agents act within them. If they are secret, then we do not have access to this information. The presence and extent of transparency has tremendous impact on how political institutions function. The purpose of this article is to offer a brief overview of what political philosophers have thus far had to say about transparency as it pertains to (...) class='Hi'>political institutions. In doing so, I hope to connect philosophical questions about transparency to relevant social scientific work and to highlight areas where more work needs to be done. (shrink)

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—including Ancient Greek, modern and contemporary theories of communitarianism, social contract, feminism, postmodernsim, Marxism, and theories of communicative actions—and offers a thematic critique and integration of these philosophies.

In contemporary philosophical thought, Leo Strauss is associated with the rediscovery of ancient political philosophy against modern political philosophy. The rediscovery of ancient political philosophy is the rediscovery of classical rationalism or “moderate Enlightenment” against modern rationalism or “radical Enlightenment” and can be understood as recapturing the “the question of man’s right life” and “the question of the right order of society”. This article would like to show that it was his study of medieval (...) Islamic and Jewish texts that enabled Strauss to rediscover the classical rationalism. Also, in this article we would like to argue that although the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, Reason and Revelation embodies two irreconcilable alternatives or a way of life in his thought, this opposition should be only examined with references to claims about radical rationalism of modern philosophy. In this case, we would like to argue that there can be seen a commonality between these “opponents”, i.e., Athens and Jerusalem, Reason and Revelation in terms of both their attitudes towards morality and their approaches to the relationship between philosophy and society. (shrink)

What is political philosophy’s relation to moral philosophy? Does it simply form part of moral philosophy, focusing on the proper application of certain moral truths to political reality? Or must it instead form a more autonomous discipline, drawing its bearings from the specifically political problem of determining the bounds of legitimate coercion? In this essay I work out an answer to these questions by examining both some of the classical views on the nature of (...) political philosophy and, more particularly, some recently published writings by Bernard Williams and G.A. Cohen. (shrink)

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.

The studies in this 1996 volume consider Hegel's mature views on ethics and politics and relate them to the classical tradition of Western political thought. Manfred Tiedel brings to the analysis of Hegel's views a high level of scholarship and a thorough knowledge of earlier thinkers. Concentrating on the Philosophy of Right, he reveals connections which clarify Hegel's understanding of his relationship with his predecessors and of the transformation of political philosophy which Hegel wanted to effect. (...) In doing so, he throws much needed light on the structure of Hegel's work and on many of its more obscure doctrines concerning natural law, political economy, civil society and the state. Professor Riedel's work is highly regarded in Germany. The translation of these essays will provide a valuable counterpart to the approach of most English-speaking scholars and will help significantly to extend the understanding and appreciation of Hegel's political philosophy. (shrink)

How to hospitably welcome refugees and migrants presents urgent questions for social and political thought. Current debates can be attributed to three discursive fields. Liberal versions hold that there are good reasons for political and legal limits of hospitality, critical perspectives advocate a renewed cosmopolitanism and, finally, deconstructive perspectives focus on the demand of unconditional hospitality as an absolute ethical requirement. These concepts trouble the conventional congruence of citizenship and bounded territory that make up modern nation states, on (...) the one hand. On the other hand, they affirm the rights of political communities to decide on the contents and the extent of the universal duty to host those endangered. Taking the Mediterranean and the local arena (Lampedusa) as the example, the article, which is based on extensive, multi-sited anthropological field research, engages with the tensions and limits inherent in current notions of hospitality. (shrink)

The paper deals with the idea of cosmopolitanism in contemporary Anglo-American social and political philosophy. The aim of the paper is to introduce cosmopolitan theories as one of the components of the concept of global justice. Its basis is the clarification of the theoretical ground of cosmopolitanism. Attention is paid also to the problems of moral argumentation in contemporary Anglo-American social and political philosophy.

Human beings are not only self-conscious minds but embodied and social beings, whose subjectivity is conditioned by their social surroundings. From this point of view, it is natural to suppose that the development and existence of a subject that is distinctively human requires contact with other people. The present contribution discusses medieval ideas concerning the intersubjective constitution of human being by looking at the medieval reception of two ideas, which Aristotle presents at the beginning of his Politics: (1) human beings (...) are political animals by nature, which means that those who live outside of political communities due to their nature are either deficient or above humanity – they are beasts or gods; and (2) human beings are parts of political communities, and as such, comparable to hands in a body. When medieval philosophers consider these ideas from metaphysical and normative perspectives, they distinguish different senses in which human beings are naturally political. In effect, they draw a nuanced picture of the relation between an individual human being and the political community, and in so doing they distance themselves from a literal reading of Aristotle. An analysis of the medieval discussions reveals how the social aspect of human subjectivity emerges in medieval political philosophy and how medieval philosophers conceptualise the Aristotelian distinction into three kinds of beings – the beast, the human, and the god. (shrink)

Johann Arnason’s work combines the most erudite historical-comparative sociology, discussing highly knowledgeably enormous stretches of world-history, with the most subtle social and political philosophy, drawing creatively on the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Invariably, his works introduce more nuance and sophistication into the analysis of even very well studied socio-historical phenomena. At the same time, he addresses such major phenomena in terms of modernity, democracy and capitalism, agreeing that there often – maybe always – is a combination of (...) empirical, conceptual and normative issues at work when analysing human history. Nevertheless, readers of his work may at the same time be impressed by the nuance and sophistication and at a loss with regard to what such further refinement of our socio-historical knowledge entails in terms of understanding our own time in its historical context. Searching through Johann Arnason’s work, this article identifies unexplored questions in the conceptual and historical relation between civilization, modernity, and equality and tries to understand why they have been left open. (shrink)

This review essay is occasioned by two books on the moral and political thought of William James. Sarin Marchetti’s Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James and Trygve Throntveit’s William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic pose crucial questions for how we are to frame, interpret, and assess the philosophical contributions of William James more than one hundred years after his passing. In offering interpretations of James as contributing to social and political questions through his moral (...) philosophy, both books raise important questions that bear on contemporary debates in political philosophy between ideal theorists and political realists. If ideal theorists put moral philosophy first and extract a political vision therefrom, political realists seek to begin theoretical reflection in the specifically political circumstances of our lives. This review essay is centered on the following question: through which of these two lenses should the writings of William James be received? (shrink)

Modern barbarity will soon get rid of the human species unless a new form of violence is found able to compete with the state, without turning into a new form a state. This new form is authoritative, legitimate intimidation. But what are the conditions to speak out authoritatively? Are they not distinctive state conditions? Moreover, does authority lie in the form of discourse? If not, because consentment has superseded mere submission, which are the authoritative sources of discourse which, though neither (...) overtly nor primarily conflicting with the state, nor with corporations, could somehow not completely coincide with the interests of it and even work against it, though like it? This paper examines these questions. (shrink)

Bioethics is taking an institutional turn, where organizations are being taken seriously as moral agents. Within US healthcare, this is difficult to do without confronting “the market” as a highly influential context for organizational behavior. In the 1990s, pioneering thinkers such as David Mechanic,1 Brad Gray, and Mark Schlesinger2 undertook a first round of organizational ethics scholarship focused on how market forces influence health insurer behavior — motivated by a particular concern for health maintenance organizations (HMOs).3 And more recently, owing (...) partly to a transfer of financial risk4 to healthcare delivery organizations,5 rapid consolidation within health system markets,6 and the pronounced uptick in physician employment,7 the behavior of healthcare delivery organizations is also being assessed in relation to market forces. (shrink)

Although topics in social and political philosophy might not be the first to associate with Mamardašvili, it is argued in this paper that key concepts in his thought, viz. the concepts of form, thought, and culture come together, in the 1980s in particular, in a notion of civil society that goes deeper than that of many of his contemporaries. The relevance of his philosophy at this point is intensified by the specific nature of Soviet philosophical culture, but, (...) it is argued, extends well beyond that, fully justifying his honorary title of “Georgian Socrates”. (shrink)

This book focuses on the domains of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory within African philosophy. At the heart of the volume is a call to imagine African political philosophy as embodying a needs-based political vision. While discourses in African political philosophy have fixated on the normative framework of human rights law to articulate demands for social and global justice, this book charts a new frontier in African political (...) thought by turning from ‘rights’ to ‘needs.’ The authors aim to re-orient discourses in African philosophy beyond the impasse of rights-based confrontations to shift the conversation toward needs as a cornerstone of African political theory. (shrink)

Reviews the book "Science, Truth, and Democracy," by Philip Kitcher.

政治社会への新しい視座を導く案内書。「正義」からではなく「不正義」から見ると自明とされている制度や規範はどのように異なって見えるのか。思想家たちが問題を発見してきた視座に注目し、この社会の政治を問い返 す。.

The essays in this book weave together insights and arguments from such diverse traditions as German critical theory, French philosophy and social theory, and recent Anglo-American moral and political theory, offering a unique approach to the political and theoretical consequences of the modernism/postmodernism discussion. Through an analysis of central themes in classical Marxism and early critical theory, the author shows how recent work in a variety of traditions converges on the need to question familiar distinctions between material (...) production and culture, the public and the private, and the political and the social, and to reconsider the conceptions of agency and power that have informed them. (shrink)

Despite a common agenda of normative analysis of the international order, philosophical work on international political morality and international law and legal scholarship have, until recently, worked at a distance from one another.The mutual suspicion can be traced to different aims and methodologies, including a divide between work on matters of deep structure, on the one hand, and practical institutional analysis and prescription, on the other. Yet international law is a key part of the normative practices ofstates, has a (...) direct effect on state behavior, and, as a meth-odological matter, can contribute to good theorizing onmatters of international ethics. Recently, philosophical workhas demonstrated a greater engagement with the moral aspects of international law. One strand of scholarship has treated the rules of international law as a proper subject for philosophical inquiry. Another has used international legal rules to support moral arguments about aspects of the international order. Future dialogue and cooperation would benefit both fields, in particular on the challenges to global cooperation from nationalism and on strategies for allocating responsibilities among global actors for rectifying global harms. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek ist einer der prominentesten linken Intellektuellen. Der Sammelband lädt ein, Zizeks Ideen kritisch zu diskutieren, insbesondere sein Verständnis von Politik, politischen Organisationen und dem (vergangenen, gegenwärtigen und zukünftigen) Staat.

The gift of death and the new magic of politics: Hegel and Tolkien on sorcery and secondary worlds -- The political theology of catastrophe: Plato's Athenian Atlantis, Tolkien's Númenoran Atalantë, and the Nazi Reich -- Burglar and bourgeois? Bilbo Baggins' dialectical ethics -- Hobbes, Hobbits, and the modern state of Mordor: myths of power and desire in Leviathan and Tolkien's Legendarium -- Middle-earth and the return of the common good -- Epilogue: from apocalypse to eucatastrophe: "The end of history," (...) happy endings, and the politics of narrative form. (shrink)

Yet precisely because the book is so foundational, if we want to understand Strauss’s notoriously careful and complex thinking in these essays, we must also consider them just as Strauss treated philosophers of the past: on their own ...

The paper treats about the relation between ideas of democracy and justice produced by a leading American political philosopher - John Rawls and ideology of multiculturalism. The author tries to show that Rawls’ arguments cannot meet the expectations of partisans of the ideology in question because they are very much Western or ethnocentric at the bottom. He argues that such a predicament is not to be lamented about because to be Western or ethnocentric when Euro-American culture is at stake (...) is not something bad. On the contrary, being true to the some ideas of Western culture, especially these ones that are connected with individualism, human rights and liberal democracy, is worthy of acceptation. The conclusion of his paper says that the ideology of multiculturalism can be accepted only in its moderate forms and should be rejected in its extreme forms. It means that the limit of approval of multiculturalism lies at the political level and is connected with the relation of this ideology to the core political values of the Western culture. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Paul Ricœur’s political philosophical writings on the task of decolonization and European responsibility in light of a horizon of intercultural dialogue. Departing from the exchange between Ricœur and his former student Enrique Dussel, it discusses the Ricœurian critique of modernity. After giving some background on Ricœur’s reflections on decolonization, it will clarify what Ricœur calls the “crisis of the concrete universal in the thinking and in the historical experience of Western Europe,” and what role cultural difference (...) has in this crisis. Considering Ricœur’s explicitly European perspective, this will lead us to a critical discussion on the envisioned possibility of a world-historical subject. Finally, I will discuss the role of European self-reflection in relation to a horizon of intercultural dialogue and narration from a post-/decolonial perspective. (shrink)

Recently debates about the worth of “ideal theory” have directed attention to the functions that an account of a perfectly just society can serve. One function is that of “reconciliation”: learning that a seemingly undesirable feature of the social world would exist even in the perfectly just society can show us the value that it has in the present as well. John Rawls has emphasized reconciliation as among the roles of political philosophy. For instance, Rawls claims that his (...) theory of justice can reconcile us to the pluralism of liberal democracies. In this essay, I argue that Rawls’s political theory also can reconcile the inhabitants of liberal democratic societies to the fact that such societies may be cognitively confusing on account of their complexity. Then I contend that Rawls’s work offers valuable theoretical resources for analysing a society’s transparency or lack thereof. (shrink)

In this article the author examines the first domestic philosophical debate between the two authors who perform within liberal positions. It is a debate between Leon Kojen and Aleksandar Pavkovic, conducted during 1985 in the pages of several national magazines. The main subject of controversy is the question of establishment of liberalism. Kojen is committed to seeing that liberalism is based on the equal rights, equal rights to freedom. Pavkovic criticizes this view and suggests different approach which establishes liberalism starting (...) from interests. The author is analyzing their articles and arguments, but also attempts to shed light on the overall political and intellectual context of the liberalization of society in which the debate takes place. (shrink)

The ISI Guides to the Major Disciplines are reader-friendly introductions to the most important fields of knowledge in the liberal arts. Written by leading scholars for both students and the general public, they will be appreciated by anyone desiring a reliable and informative tour of important subject matter. Each title offers an historical overview of a particular discipline, explains the central ideas of each subject, and evaluates the works of thinkers whose ideas have shaped our world. They will aid students (...) seeking to make better decisions about their course of study as well as general readers who wish to supplement their education. All who treasure the world of ideas and liberal learning will be motivated by these original and stimulating presentations. (shrink)

_Contexts of Justice,_ highly acclaimed when it was published in Germany, provides a significant new intervention into the important debate between communitarianism and liberalism. Rainer Forst argues for a theory of "contexts of justice" that leads beyond the narrow confines of this debate as it has been understood until now and posits the possibility of a new conception of social and political justice. This book brings refreshing clarity to a complex topic as it provides a synthesis of traditions and (...) theories that leads to a truly original approach. Forst makes a four-part distinction to decipher the debate between communitarianism and liberalism. These four parts concern the constitution of the self, the neutrality of law, the ethos of democracy, and the opposition between universalism and contextualism. He shows that a comprehensive theory of justice needs to take these different contexts adequately into account. He discusses recent debates about discursive democracy and feminist critiques of liberalism, and addresses such topics as multiculturalism and civil society. (shrink)

The west-centrism in approaching the knowledge systems of east has been sufficiently highlighted and problematized. This paper argues that the attempts have often been restricted to a framework of colonial gaze that prevents the Indian classical philosophy from gaining a vantage of its own. The approach to the classical traditions have been largely fragmented, catering to the pressure of proving its “relevance” either as a knowledge system or as texts with useful resources and answers to contemporary problems. This “problem (...) solving” framework at the very outset de-recognizes the capacity of an entire philosophical tradition of problem identification and formulation, unsettling terrains of knowledge by asking new questions. The article presents a case for theorizing relevance as a prerequisite to resolving some of these issues. (shrink)

Książka ta jest poświęcona analizie filozofii politycznej Johna Deweya osadzonej w kontekście kryzysu liberalizmu po pierwszej wojnie światowej. Jedną z dróg wyjścia z impasu, w jakim znalazła się myśl liberalna, był radykalny liberalizm reprezentowany przez takich intelektualistów, jak John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Karl Polanyi i Karl Mannheim. Wymienieni myśliciele upatrywali szans na odrodzenie liberalizmu w odrzuceniu koncepcji wolnorynkowych i dialogu z myślą socjalistyczną. W pracy przedstawiono zręby ideologii radykalnego liberalizmu oraz stosunek lewicowych liberałów do innych ideologii, w szczególności zaś do (...) liberalizmu ekonomicznego i rewolucyjnego marksizmu. Osobny rozdział pracy poświęcony jest refleksji Johna Deweya na temat demokracji, która należy do najoryginalniejszych osiągnięć amerykańskiego filozofa. Przedstawiona interpretacja uwypukla związki myśli Johna Deweya z radykalizmem Nowej Lewicy oraz twórczością takich teoretyków, jak C. W. Mills Axell Honneth czy James Bohman. Drugim ważnym obszarem podejmowanych w pracy rozważań jest rekonstrukcja Deweyowskiej koncepcji myślenia jako rozwiązywania problemów. Pragmatyzm utrzymuje, że możliwe jest znalezienie mniej lub bardziej obiektywnych odpowiedzi na pytanie, co należy robić w danej problematycznej sytuacji. „Pragmatyczne oświecenie”, by posłużyć się terminem Hilarego Putnama, wyrzeka się oświeceniowego uniwersalizmu, ale nie rezygnuje całkowicie z roszczeń do obiektywności w dziedzinie rozstrzygnięć moralnych i politycznych. (shrink)

Kant's various teachings concerning (world) peace are characterized by a philosophically unique realism. Thereby, they are fundamentally distinguished from all preceding doctrines about peace. This thesis of realism refers to various aspects, respectively levels, of the doctrine, namely: 1) in general to the assumptions of the doctrine of Right3 altogether (ch. II); 2) in particular to the assumptions of the doctrine of eternal peace (chs. III-V); 3) to the recommendations with regard to the realization of eternal peace (chs. VI-XI); 4) (...) to the reasons by which Kant justifies the hope with regard to eternal peace (ch. XII, XIV-XVII); 5) to Kant's strict denial of a specifically political "morals" (ch. XIII-XVII). (shrink)

In 1911 Gerald F. Shove, later to become a leading Cambridge economist, submitted to King's College a fellowship dissertation on the application of G.E. Moore's ethical philosophy to political theory. In the article the dissertation, hitherto unpublished, is discussed with reference to both the acceptance and elaboration of Moore's Principia Ethica by the members of the Apostles and Bloomsbury groups and Shove's intellectual and personal biography. The thesis tackles some major concepts in political theory like the nature (...) of human societies, self-government, justice and freedom. (shrink)

This paper begins by describing recent controversies over cross-contamination of crops in the United States and European Union. The EU and US are both applying the principle of freedom of cropping to resolve these conflicts, which is based on an individualistic philosophy. However, despite the EU and the US starting with the principle of freedom of cropping they have very dissimilar regulatory regimes for coexistence. These contradictory policies based upon the same principle are creating different sets of winners and (...) losers. In the US the organic industry claims the system of coexistence is unfair and in the EU the biotech industry claims the system is unfair. It seems that states, despites claims to neutrality and freedom of choice, are prejudicing one system of agriculture over another in resolutions to the conflict over cross contamination. In this paper I will argue that if states cannot remain neutral in coexistence policies, there are conditional reasons for favoring the organic industry over the biotech industry in coexistence policies based in communitarian moral philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with John Stuart Mill’s democratic theory. In chapter I, I examine the relations between political philosophy and political theory and science before providing a detailed outline of the aims of the dissertation. In chapter II, I argue that in order to reconcile the concepts of progress and equality within a utilitarian theory, a Millian political system needs to devise institutions that promote general happiness, protect individual autonomy, safeguard society from mediocrity. Chapter III (...) discusses what different authors have said about Mill and liberty, then explores James Mill’s theory of education and Coleridge’s influence on John Stuart Mill’s thought. I conclude by criticising Richard Arneson’s interpretation according to which the Considerations and On Liberty are inconsistent, and some of Gregory Claeys’ conclusions on Mill and paternalism. Chapter IV explores the methodology of the social sciences and the philosophy of history as found in Mill’s writings; then it considers Mill’s thought in regard to his father’s Radical proposals. I also discuss at some length the idea of the tyranny of the majority. Chapter V begins with a discussion of Hanna Pitkin’s theory of representation. I then provide a critical account of Richard Krouse and Nadia Urbinati’s interpretations of Mill. I conclude by arguing that, in a Millian democracy, the higher is the degree of complexity or the need for expertise in dealing with affairs, the greater is the bearing of the principle of competence in assessing whether a representative should act as a trustee or a delegate. I also introduce the idea of rational debate as a sort of ‘influence multiplier’, arguing that this would help to make a democracy rational and effective along Millian lines. In the last two chapters, I stress the relevance of Mill’s political philosophy as for some contemporary issues (nationalism, European federalism, current social and economic changes) while suggesting some potential further investigations, and summarise my conclusions. (shrink)