Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View essentially reflects the last lectures Kant gave for his annual course in anthropology, which he taught from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. The lectures were published in 1798, with the largest first printing of any of Kant's works. Intended for a broad audience, they reveal not only Kant's unique contribution to the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, but also his desire to offer students a practical view of the world and of humanity's (...) place in it. With its focus on what the human being 'as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself,' the Anthropology also offers readers an application of some central elements of Kant's philosophy. This volume offers a new annotated translation of the text by Robert B. Louden, together with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn that explores the context and themes of the lectures. (shrink)

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This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. (...) He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. (shrink)

Displaying an impressive command of complex materials, Seyla Benhabib reconstructs the history of theories from a systematic point of view and examines the origins and transformations of the concept of critique from the works of Hegel to Habermas. Through investigating the model of the philosophy of the subject, she pursues the question of how Hegel´s critiques might be useful for reforumulating the foundations of critical social theory.

The original edition of Kant: Political Writings was first published in 1970, and has long been established as the principal English-language edition of this important body of writing. In this new, expanded edition two important texts illustrating Kant's view of history are included for the first time, his reviews of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind and Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, as well as the essay What is Orientation in Thinking?. In addition to (...) a general introduction assessing Kant's political thought in terms of his fundamental principles of politics, this edition also contains such useful student aids as notes on the texts, a comprehensive bibliogaphy and a new postscript, looking at some of the principal issues in Kantian scholarship that have arisen since the first edition. (shrink)

Fred Dallmayr is Packey Dee Professor of Government at the University of Notre Dame.Contributors: Robert Alexy. Karl-Otto Apel. Seyla Benhabib. Dietrich Bohler. Jurgen Habermas. Otfried Hoffe. KarlHeinz Ilting. Hermann Lubbe.

1 A New Departure 'No commanding work of political theory has appeared in the 20th century.' So said Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1962 . ...

The essays in this book contain some of Paul Ricoeur's most fascinating ruminations on the nature of justice and the law.

Is there such a thing as human nature? Sean Sayers gives an ambitious and wide ranging defence of the Marxist and Hegelian approach to uphold the controversial theory that human nature is actually a historical phenomenon.

Rawlsian liberalism is best understood and defended on the basis of a concrete but widely shared ideal of the person as a rational agent capable of normative self?determination in the proper political and economic conditions. In Rawls? recent works, this neo?Kantian ideal of free moral personality is no longer understood as a requirement of rational or moral agency as such, but is a concrete historical ideal or meta?value presupposed by the living tradition of liberal?democratic judgment and practice, which reason can (...) recover through a critical reflection upon this tradition. Read in this way, Rawls? theory of social justice articulates a quite powerful, rational, concrete, historical, and social dimension of modern political identity, which the critics of liberalism cannot plausibly deny. But there are other rival, powerful bourgeois?individualist and patriarchal ideals of personhood, equally rooted in modern political judgments and practices, which Rawlsian liberalism ignores, and which taken together generate the social tensions, instabilities, and conflicts of social justice characteristic of modern liberal?democratic society. Rawlsian theory and liberal political thought requires but essentially lacks a conception of moral reason adequate to comprehend and mediate these normative incoherences built into modern Western political identity. A larger more adequate paradigm of moral reason and political theory is required to overcome these deficiencies. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Kant's idea of cosmopolitanism both in its prescriptive dimension (its normative content and regulative aspirations) and also its descriptive basis (its crucial philosophical-anthropological assumptions constituting its theoretical justification). My aim is to show that the prescriptive dimension cannot be treated separately from the descriptive one for some difficulties that the latter confronts pervade the former and misinform it. I then proceed to an examination of those difficulties which I locate mainly in Kant's onto-theological commitment to (...) some anthropological tenets of his era. I explore the implications of these tenets and show that they contribute negatively to the task of the promotion of a cosmopolitanism that respects difference and heterogeneity. I conclude with some critical suggestions pro-pounding a renegotiation of the paradigmatic certainties of Kant's cosmopolitanism in order to salvage its normative import and couch it in less onto-theological terms. (shrink)

John Rawls has recently shifted to a "freestanding" or "political" liberalism from his earlier "comprehensive" and "moral" liberalism. I argue that this move is based on several key features that make Rawlsian liberal pluralism indelibly postmodern. Two of the more obvious features are the denial of foundationalism and the rejection of a truth status for public-sphere justifications of the basic political structure. In conclusion, I suggest that a late-modern postliberalism is a viable alternative.

We can distinguish between those political philosophers who are concerned to carry the original Kantian project further, like Wolfgang Kersting, Otfried Höffe, Ernest Weinrib and Fernando Teson, and those contemporary political philosophers who have given up the original project but seek to draw inspiration from Kant's thinking. Two political philosophers who belong to this latter trend are Habermas and Rawls.

In this provocative book, Kariel offers a pessimistic meditation on the postmodern art and aesthetics that have emerged in reaction to the oppressive structures of our society and that represent, he feels, a desperate effort to revive that which is deadened by technology and instrumentalism. Kariel identifies a pragmatic aesthetics that links playful activities in all domains, arguing that only by fusing spontaneous and instrument action and by continually deconstructing, reviewing, and regrouping our centering sources can we defuse the oppressive (...) elements of our modern cultural landscape. (shrink)