Should we in the moral community accept the modern business corporation as one of us? French answers 'yes'. In this book, French investigates the metaphysical foundations of the application of our established moral principles to corporations as moral persons.

In recent years there has been an interesting turn in the philosophical literature to groups and collective action. At the same time there has been a renewed interest in various forms of methodological individualism. This paper attempts to show the diversity of group action that is overlooked by much of the literature, to clarify some of the ambiguities that plague our language about groups and collectives, and to support the view that social entities are genuine. Some important arguments against social (...) entities being genuine are rebutted. The existence of social entities gives some substance to the debate about methodological individualism, but the resolution of the debate has depended too much on empirical results in the distant future. The article ends with some suggestions on how the debate matters in looking for biases in the directions of current social theorizing. (shrink)

What has come to be called ‘analytical Marxism’ is to be celebrated when properly understood. It is a phenomenon that has engaged some of the best people in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. In the last fifteen years there has been a blossoming of anaytic studies on Marx and on Marxism in the mainstreams of academic disciplines, with the first impetus coming from philosophers who had been working in the analytic tradition. During the previous sixty years of (...) analytic philosophy virtually nothing was said about Marxism. It was not even considered worthy of philosophical attack. Bertrand Russell, who did write on Marxist topics, confined his considerations on Marx to popular texts. Karl Popper, who did take Marxism seriously philosophically, concentrated on criticisms which were in any case ignored by analytic philosophers. (shrink)

I am not sure how confident we can be about our knowledge of the meaning of a sentence, but I am sure that we should be much less confident than we often are about the meaning of a word or non-sentential expression. This paper is an attempt to whittle away our confidence about word-meaning, and it is to this end that I investigate the meaning of the word ‘know'. But the point of the investigation is to show that it is (...) not enough to investigate just the meaning of a word. We must investigate the syntax as well, something that philosophers have often ignored. A theory of meaning must be closely tied to a theory of syntax, and for one to be acceptable the other must be acceptable as well. A theory of language must be an integrated theory, and hypotheses about syntax and meaning stand or fall together. (shrink)

Comparative Political Philosophy: Studies Under the Upas Tree examines four major traditions of political philosophy and discusses similarities in their key ideas and assumptions. An intellectually daring enterprise, this fascinating volume focuses on key texts from Chinese, Indian, Western and Islamic political philosophy.

Hegel's interpretation of Plato's political thought provides the principal illustration of his metaphilosophy. However, Hegel has been criticized for imposing his own metaphilosophical agenda upon Plato's work, and for consequently overestimating its descriptive content while underestimating its prescriptively normative features. A reexamination of Hegel's metaphilosophy nevertheless reveals that he appreciated the broader significance of Plato's political philosophy within a conceptual framework that transcends the traditional dichotomy of description and prescription and that explores issues concerning the relation of theory and practice.

Typical philosophies of liberation often assume, and sometimes argue, that freedom and democracy will be best experienced through an absence of institutions. Contrary to this trend in theory, the author argues that a better philosophy of liberation will seek to transform institutions, rather than abolish them. Using examples of cooperative experiments in the Basque territories and in Brazil, the author argues that experiences of liberation are achieved through new forms of institutional life that nurture participatory and egalitarian relationships between people.

Hegel's logic provides a basis for an interpretation of his philosophy of history and political theory which avoids many of the difficulties that traditionally have been associated with his views, leaving us with a clear and useful model of modern political interaction. The unification of content and form provides for the inherently historicist features of the model, that resolve the traditional dichotomy of description and prescription by presenting the state as a historical process, developing through the opposition between the normative (...) claims of its constituents and the determinate socio-political arrangements existing at any particular stage in its history. The discussion begins with a brief examination of Hegel's doctrines of the concept and the _idea, which it subsequently applies to an interpretation of his concepts of _Sittlichkeit and the state. (shrink)

Jürger Habermas has been attempting to develop a critical theory of society with a practical intent, on the basis of communication and a theory of the evolution of practical and moral social competence. He thinks that the studies of language rules and language learning from Piaget, Searle, Chomsky and others have and continue to provide models elsewhere - from productive activity to moral activity. Moreover, the models are said to extend to social learning, which will be exhibited in the development (...) of society.Furthermore, speech acts, which are to be described by a theory of pragmatics, anticipate the establishment of ideal speech situations, which are the avenue to ‘truth, freedom, and Justice.'. (shrink)

This volume offers a new interpretation of Hegel's thought, challenging traditional readings and reconsidering Hegel in terms of his understanding of his own philosophy. Ware connects Hegel to analytic philosophy through mathematical logic.

This book responds to the need for a retrieval and renewal of the work of Karl Marx through close philosophical analysis of his publications, manuscripts, and letters — especially those relevant to politics, morality, and the future. This philosophical study stands out because of its two principal features. First, it reviews and develops ideas about the future, though often only briefly discussed by Marx and his commentators, drawn from Marx's work. Second, it focuses on collective matters that are critical for (...) Marx's ideas but rarely investigated and still problematic. Part One introduces Marx with a discussion of emancipation and freedom in community. It then discusses the importance of retrieval and the methodology for promoting it. Part Two is about misunderstandings of Marx's ideas about productive development, division of labour, and organisations. Part Three discusses nations, morality, and democracy, all of which Marx supported. Part Four takes up Marx's significant, but misunderstood, ideas about the future and his relation to the anarchists. (shrink)

In the last three decades, we in the West have seen nationalism turn from an apparently progressive force, as in Cuba, Vietnam, and many countries in Africa, into a negative force of degenerating chaos, as in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. Elsewhere, during the same decades, the record of nationalism has been, or at least been perceived to have been, more mixed, for example in Belgium, Canada, and India. The assessments themselves are uncertain and suspect, however. Maybe (...) nationalism was not so clearly progressive or so clearly retrogressive where we had previously thought it so. Maybe we misjudge its ambivalence elsewhere. Maybe we are not even dealing with the same kind of phenomenon.More generally, we have yet to understand the role of nationalism in two world wars and countless imperialist incursions. We have only the vaguest ideas of its connection to social ideologies and movements like racism, fascism, and Nazism and little understanding of its relevance to economic systems like capitalism and socialism. (shrink)

Unger extends Singer’s arguments and demands for aiding serious sufferers, especially children, of whom over ten million die yearly of easily preventable diseases. According to Unger, our callous behaviour in ignoring such suffering is partly the result of dispositions that distort our moral understandings and motivations. He sees our present practices as barbarous, and argues for a liberationist position on morality, calling for major revisions in our moral thinking and practices. He even gives the 1-800 numbers which, with a credit (...) card, you can easily phone to save many children. (shrink)

Michael Howard begins with quick sketches of the travesties that show the crisis of global capitalism and then introduces the book’s comprehensive study showing the fertile seeds of socialism. The only suggestion of a perceived crisis of socialism is in the title and in a few sentences in the introduction about crises of identity on the left and about crises of “principles, institutions, and practices”, of socialism, the themes of the three parts of this wide-ranging book. The extensive discussion of (...) socialist ideas and experiments suggests that the only crisis is that capitalism is global, the challenge in the background. (shrink)