How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas's thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas's political theory, the term "inverted liberalism " would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term "inverted" over "liberalism." Levinas's defense of liberalism is (...) likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered. We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected for the sake of the other individual. Whether this has anything to do with "real" liberalism, and whether it should, is the topic of this essay. (shrink)

"This is an excellent, readable and vigorous translation of _The Prince_, but it is much more than simply a translation. The map, notes and guide to further reading are crisp, to-the-point and yet nicely comprehensive. The inclusion of the letter to Vettori is most welcome. But, above all, the Introduction is so gripping and lively that it has convinced me to include _The Prince_ in my syllabus for History of Western Civilization the next time that I teach it.... Great price, (...) too! And lovely printing and layout." --Rachel Fulton, _University of Chicago_. (shrink)

First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to account for the world in all its significant aspects. It gives a unique and influential account of what is and is not of value in existence, the striving and pain of the human condition and the possibility of (...) deliverance from it. This new translation of the first volume of what later became a two-volume work reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names and bibliography, and succinct editorial notes, including notes on the revisions of the text which Schopenhauer made in 1844 and 1859. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient (...) Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent''s life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say. (shrink)

The Florentine political philosopher's commentaries on Livy's history of Rome are accompanied by critical and textual notes.

Egalitarians have traditionally been suspicious of equality of opportunity, but recently there has been a sea-change in thinking about that concept. Shlomi Segall brings together these developments and offers a new account of 'radical equality of opportunity', which removes all obstacles (to one's opportunity-set) that lie outside one's control.

This was scanned from the 1909 edition and mechanically checked against a commercial copy of the text from CDROM. Differences were corrected against the paper edition. The text itself is thus a highly accurate rendition. The footnotes were entered manually.

Introduction to the work David Hume described as the best of his many writings.

A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This edition includes, in addition to the most pertinent sections of The Fable's two volumes, a selection from Mandeville's An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor and selections from two of Mandeville's most important sources: Pierre Bayle and the Jansenist Pierre Nicole. Hundert's Introduction places Mandeville in a number of eighteenth-century debates--particularly that of the nature and morality of commercial modernity--and underscores the degree to which his work stood as a central problem, not only for his immediate English contemporaries, but (...) for such philosophers as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. The selections are substantive enough to faithfully represent Mandeville the social theorist, and compact enough to be used in courses that can afford to spend no more than a week on his work. (shrink)

Fred Miller offers a controversial reappraisal of the Politics, suggesting that nature, justice, and rights are central to Aristotle's political thought. He sheds new light on Aristotle's relation to modern natural rights theorists, and to the current liberalism-communitarianism debate.

Among the most influential parts of the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) were his ethics, his theory of the state, and his philosophy of history. The Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) (1821), the last work published in Hegel's lifetime, is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. Here Hegel repudiates his earlier assessment of the French Revolution as a "a marvelous sunrise" in the realization of liberty. (...) Rejecting the republican form of government, he espouses an idealized form of a constitutional monarchy, whose ultimate power rests with the sovereign. (shrink)

Almost alone among nineteenth-century historians, Jacob Burckhardt saw the totalitarian direction that history could take. This book (first published in English in 1943 as "Force and Freedom") is a guide to the study and comprehension of historical processes. Burckhardt makes a clear distinction between the state and the voluntary activities of society. He focuses on the nature and reciprocal interactions of the state, religion, and culture.

Examines the diverse cultural influences which have shaped the basic philosophical traditions of India "Indian philosophy was at the heart of Zimmer's interest..

Originally published in 1973. The volume is divided into four sections: The introduction places the position of the Buddhist Tantras within Mahayana Buddhism and recalls their early literary history, especially the Guhyasamahatantra; the section also covers Buddhist Genesis and the Tantric tradition. The foundations of the Buddhist Tantras are discussed and the Tantric presentation of divinity; the preparation of disciples and the meaning of initiation; symbolism of the mandala-palace Tantric ritual and the twilight language. This section explores the Tantric teachings (...) of the inner Zodiac and the fivefold ritual symbolism of passion. The bibliographical research contains an analysis of the Tantric section of the Kanjur exegesis and a selected Western Bibliography of the Buddhist Tantras with comments. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

Why do American ghettos persist? Decades after Moynihan’s report on the black family and the Kerner Commission’s investigations of urban disorders, deeply disadvantaged black communities remain a disturbing reality. Scholars and commentators today often identify some factor―such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime―as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor (...) as moral agents responding to injustice. (shrink)

Stephen Salkever shows that reading Aristotle is a starting point for discussing contemporary political problems in new ways that avoid the opposition between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism, between the politics of rights and the politics of virtues. Originally published in 1990. 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. (shrink)

Controversies about abortion, the environment, pornography, AIDS, and similar issues naturally lead to the question of whether there are any values that can be ultimately justified, or whether values are simply conventional. John Kekes argues that the present moral and political uncertainties are due to a deep change in our society from a dogmatic to a pluralistic view of values. Dogmatism is committed to there being only one justifiable system of values. Pluralism recognizes many such systems, and yet it avoids (...) a chaotic relativism according to which all values are in the end arbitrary. Maintaining that good lives must be reasonable, but denying that they must conform to one true pattern, Kekes develops and justifies a pluralistic account of good lives and values, and works out its political, moral, and personal implications. (shrink)

Apologies can be profoundly meaningful, yet many gestures of contrition - especially those in legal contexts - appear hollow and even deceptive. Discussing numerous examples from ancient and recent history, I Was Wrong argues that we suffer from considerable confusion about the moral meanings and social functions of these complex interactions. Rather than asking whether a speech act 'is or is not' an apology, Smith offers a highly nuanced theory of apologetic meaning. Smith leads us though a series of rich (...) philosophical and interdisciplinary questions, explaining how apologies have evolved from a confluence of diverse cultural and religious practices that do not translate easily into secular discourse or gender stereotypes. After classifying several varieties of apologies between individuals, Smith turns to apologies from collectives. Although apologies from corporations, governments, and other groups can be quite meaningful in certain respects, we should be suspicious of those that supplant apologies from individual wrongdoers. (shrink)

This work addresses the topic of philosophical complexity, which shares certain assumptions with scientific complexity, cybernetics, and General Systems Theory, but which is also developing as a subject field in its own right. Specifically, the post-structural reading of philosophical complexity that was pioneered by Paul Cilliers is further developed in this study. To this end, the ideas of a number of contemporary French post-structural theorists and their predecessors - including Derrida, Nancy, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Saussure, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel - (...) are introduced. The implications that their various insights hold for our understanding of complex human systems are teased out at the hand of the themes of economy, (social) ontology, subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics. The analyses are also illuminated at the hand of the problematic of the foreigner and the related challenges of showing hospitality to foreigners. The study presents a sophisticated account of both philosophical complexity and philosophies of difference. By relating these subject fields, the study also extends our understanding of philosophical complexity, and offers an original characterisation of the aforementioned philosophers as complex thinkers. (shrink)

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice.

Philosophisches Lexicon was the first dictionary of philosophy in a modern language. First published in 1726 by Johann Georg Walch (1693-1775), this reference work appeared in four editions. This reprint is of the second improved edition, published in 1733, which contains biographical sketches from Abelard to Zenos. The work is known for its comprehensive entries and depth of scholarship, reflecting in part the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff.

A compromise is an agreement that involves mutual concessions. Each party gets less than it feels entitled to, but agrees to it because the situation it anticipates under the deal is better than the one it expects in the absence of a deal: conflict, exit or arbitration by a third party. Some compromises, however, are bad, and others are good. This article discusses three conjectures about what it is that makes a compromise good. Is a good compromise an honourable compromise, (...) one that enables each party to save face? Is it rather a fair compromise, one that contributes to the progress of justice independently defined? Or is it a Pareto-improving compromise, one that changes things in such a way that it ends up making everyone better off than under the status quo? A compromise is never as good as a consensus, but it is generally better than nothing, and often achievable when a consensus is not. And when it is, trying to make it as good as possible in each of the three ways described is always worthwhile. © 2012 Government and Opposition Ltd. (shrink)

Das Willensfreiheitsproblem, zumal als Problem von Willensfreiheit und Determinismus, ist eines der großen Rätsel der Menschheit, das allen Versuchen zu trotzen scheint, es rational zu lösen. Kritiker haben deshalb vermutet, die Frage selbst könne falsch gestellt oder von überholten Voraussetzungen abhängig sein. Dem tritt der vorliegende Band profund entgegen, systematisch wie geistesgeschichtlich. Er legt eingehend dar, inwiefern Willensfreiheit, verstanden als Freiheit der Willensbildung, von zwar begrenzter, aber zentraler und keineswegs nur kontextrelativer Bedeutung für das Selbstverständnis von Menschen als aktive Wesen (...) ist, die verantwortlich und normenorientiert handeln können. Zugleich werden die formalen Bedingungen für eine erfolgversprechende Neuaufnahme des alten Rätsels herausgearbeitet. (shrink)

SUMMARYJeremy Bentham has two very strong commitments in his thought: one is to the principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as the fundamental principle of morality; the other is to truth, as indicated, for instance, in his opposition to falsehood and fiction in the law. How, then, did Bentham view the relationship between utility and truth? Did he think that utility and truth simply coincided, and hence that falsehood necessarily led to a diminution in happiness, and conversely truth (...) led to an increase in happiness? This article addresses this issue through two bodies of material: the first consists of Bentham's writings on religion under the heading of ‘Juggernaut’ and dating from 1811 to 1821; the second consists of the writings on judicial evidence dating from 1803 to 1812 and which appeared in Rationale of Judicial Evidence. (shrink)

This article assesses some of the implications of globalization for the scholarly debate on business ethics, CSR and related concepts. The argument is based, among other things, on the declining capacity of nation state institutions to regulate socially desirable corporate behavior as well as the growing corporate exposure to heterogeneous social, cultural and political values in societies globally. It is argued that these changes are shifting the corporate role towards a sphere of societal governance hitherto dominated by traditional political actors. (...) This leads to a discussion of the ambivalent results of such a process for a responsible corporate role in a globalized world. While assessing the current reception these changes have received in the management literature, the contributions of the four articles in this Special Issue are framed and evaluated. The argument closes by highlighting avenues of future research on this new challenge. (shrink)

Many recent political philosophers have attempted to demonstrate that choice and responsibility can be incorporated into the framework of an egalitarian theory of distributive justice. This article argues, however, that the project of developing a responsibility-based conception of egalitarian justice is misconceived. The project represents an attempt to defuse conservative criticism of the welfare state and of egalitarian liberalism more generally. But by mimicking the conservative’s emphasis on choice and responsibility, advocates of responsibility-based egalitarianism unwittingly inherit the conservative’s unsustainable justificatory (...) ambitions, unattractive moralism, and questionable metaphysical commitments. More importantly, they misrepresent the nature of our concern with equality as a value. (shrink)

Stephen Salkever shows that reading Aristotle is a starting point for discussing contemporary political problems in new ways that avoid the opposition between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism, between the politics of rights and the politics of virtues. Originally published in 1990. 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. (shrink)

The theory of equal opportunity as I have expounded it in Roemer uses a language comprising five words: objective, circumstance, type, effort, and policy. The objective is the kind of outcome or well-being or advantage for whose acquisition one wishes to equalize opportunities, in a given population. Circumstances are the set of environmental influences, beyond the individual’s control, that affect his or her chances of acquiring the objective. A type is the group of individuals in the population with a given (...) set of circumstances. Effort is autonomously chosen action—within the individual’s control—which, if expended in greater amounts, will increase the degree to which the individual acquires the objective. A policy is a social intervention that is used to influence the degree to which individuals acquire the objective. The equal-opportunity policy is the one from the set of feasible policies that will make it the case that the degree to which individuals acquire the objective is independent of their circumstances, and sensitive only to their effort. I propose a way of computing the equal-opportunity policy in any given situation, given the appropriate data, and a decision as to what environmental aspects should be taken to constitute circumstances. This quick summary leaves out many details, which will be focused upon in what follows. (shrink)

This study is concerned with john R0emer’s Equality of Opportunity} I argue that his theory is committed to compatibilism but that one of its central claims is plausible only within a libertarian view on the free-will problem. Thus Roemer’s theory is troubled by a deep structural inco— herence and should be rejected as an account of equality of opportunity? Let me briefly introduce some background to Roemer’s theory. Contemporary egalitarians face two major challenges: first, they need..

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. 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.