Reclaiming the History of Ethics

Essays for John Rawls

Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, Christine M. Korsgaard

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780521472401
• eBook ISBN: 9780511886515
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. All the contributors are philosophers who have studied with Rawls and they offer this collection in his honour. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of the subject: Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant and Marx. By reconstructing the core of these theories in a way that is informed by contemporary theoretical concerns, the contributors show how the history of the subject is a resource for understanding present and perennial problems in moral and political philosophy. This outstanding collection will be of particular interest to historians of moral and political philosophy, historians of ideas, and political scientists.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Aristotle on the Soul’s Conflicts: Toward an Understanding of Virtue Ethics
• Coercion, Ideology, and Education in Hobbes’s Leviathan
• The Hobbesian Side of Hume
• The Natural Goodness of Humanity
• Metaphysics, Philosophy: Rousseau on the Problem of Evil
• Within the Limits of Reason
• A Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends
• Legislating for a Realm of Ends: The Social Dimension of Autonomy
• Kant on the Objectivity of the Moral Law
• Kantian Virtue: Priggish or Passional?
• Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution
• Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness
• Kant on Ends and the Meaning of Life
• Community and Completion