This chapter argues that the language of ‘rights’ to secession is not helpful in dealing with the complexities of national self‐determination and is unnecessarily inflammatory and oppositional.

This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a philo sophical response both to Plato's impugning of the dignity of (...) the polis and to Hegel's founding of modern historicism. The Kant Lectures bring this philosophical project to its completion because the enact ment of public deeds presupposes a company of judging spectators who draw meaning from the spectacle by judging and appreciating what is enacted. But this conception, precisely because it relates so deeply to Arendt's own theoretical impulse, leads to a sometimes onesided and misleading reading of Kant. Key Words: aesthetic judgment • dialogue/communication • Hannah Arendt • Immanuel Kant • political judgment. (shrink)

In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the ongoing political turmoil in the Soviet Union, and the democratization of most of Latin America, what is the task of political theorists? Ronald Beiner's invigorating critique of liberal theory and liberal practices takes on the shibboleths of modern Western discourse. He confronts the aridity of liberal societies that possess incommensurable "values" and "rights," but no principles. To Beiner, this neutralist view is both a false description of liberal society (...) and an incoherent political ideal. Rather, he encourages the theorist to remain faithful to the important task of questioning and criticism, instead of serving as a source of ideological reassurance about our own superiority. Beiner looks to the Socratic tradition for guidance. Permitting ethos to replace values, and discourse about "the good" to replace talk about "rights," the theorist is able to reorder social priorities. Considered in this light, the liberal political philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s appears insufficiently Socratic, as does a liberal way of life that presents itself as a model of imitation. Polemical, impassioned, and brilliantly argued, What's the Matter with Liberalism? is essential reading for everyone who cares about contemporary theory and the future of liberal society. In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, the ongoing political turmoil in the Soviet Union, and the democratization of most of Latin America, what is the task of political theorists? Ronald Beiner's invigorating critique of liberal theory and liberal practices takes on the shibboleths of modern Western discourse. He confronts the aridity of liberal societies that possess incommensurable "values" and "rights," but no principles. To Beiner, this neutralist view is both a false description of liberal society and an incoherent political ideal. Rather, he encourages the theorist to remain faithful to the important task of questioning and criticism, instead of serving as a source of ideological reassurance about our own superiority. Beiner looks to the Socratic tradition for guidance. Permitting ethos to replace values, and discourse about "the good" to replace talk about "rights," the theorist is able to reorder social priorities. Considered in this light, the liberal political philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s appears insufficiently Socratic, as does a liberal way of life that presents itself as a model of imitation. Polemical, impassioned, and brilliantly argued, What's the Matter with Liberalism? is essential reading for everyone who cares about contemporary theory and the future of liberal society. (shrink)

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical (...) in scope. Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

Richard Rorty, with his tendency to shock, to provoke, and to seize on Continental fashions, might be thought an unlikely liberal. Nevertheless, Rorty illustrates very well some of the characteristic weaknesses of contemporary liberalism. To the extent that he draws upon postmodern and deconstructionist sources, he highlights, and radicalizes, the liberal urge to break out of frozen identities and to destabilize static roles and fixed stations in life. His distinctive version of pragmatism yields a way of drawing liberal boundaries between (...) private and public, culture and justice. And his antifoundationalism helps to legitimize a typical liberal reluctance to engage in any very ambitious social criticism. What distinguishes Rorty's liberalism is its higher degree of candor, which at least acknowledges that a liberal vision of things, far from being “neutral” toward rival ideas of the good, is implicated in the defense of a particular way of life. (shrink)

According to one model of social theory, the social theorist seeks to give as rich an account as possible of a society's own self?understanding or self?interpretation. The second model, by contrast, involves challenging the society's self?understanding on the basis of a radical vision of ultimate standards of. judgment. Charles Taylor claims that neither of these models should be privileged over the other, that both are equiprimordial ways of theorizing social life. However, Taylor does privilege the first model in his own (...) practice of social theory?which can be summed up in the phrase, ?the rhetoric of understanding.? (shrink)

Fourteen contributions from international academics examine the themes of judgment, imagination, and politics in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant. In the introduction, Beiner and Nedelsky (both political science, U. of Toronto) discuss the problem of political judgment and the recognition of subjectivity. Other topics include the challenges of diversity to the law, the public use of reason, and Arendt's lectures on Kant. c. Book News Inc.

Hannah Arendt's last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled _The Life of the Mind_. Unfortunately, Arendt lived to complete only the first two parts, _Thinking_ and _Willing_. Of the third, _Judging_, only the title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. As the titles suggest, Arendt conceived of her work as roughly parallel to the three _Critiques_ of Immanuel Kant. In fact, while she began work on _The Life of the Mind_, Arendt lectured (...) on "Kant's Political Philosophy," using the_ Critique of Judgment_ as her main text. The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area. (shrink)

Among the theorists commonly associated with the communitarian critique of liberalism of the 1980s (Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre), MacIntyre is the one who offers the most radical set of challenges to ways of thinking that typify contemporary liberalism. But does MacIntyre's thought add up to a fully worked‐out political philosophy? The specifically political implications of MacIntyre's contributions to moral philosophy are surprisingly underdeveloped in MacIntyre's most influential writings, notwithstanding the rhetorical force of his polemics against (...) liberalism. Happily, MacIntyre has more recently published works in which his political vision is more clearly spelled out. (shrink)

In the last years of his life, Michel Foucault sought to address ?ethical? questions, having to do with the self's relation to itself, by trying to locate in the Roman Stoics and other philosophers of antiquity what he called ?an aesthetics of existence.? By this Foucault meant ?the idea of a self which has to be created as a work of art.? This article aims at a critical dialogue with the texts that compose this last phase of Foucault's thought, probing (...) the moral and political adequacy of Foucault's Nietzschean vision of the self's aesthetic self?creation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Donald Trump’s thinking is too erratic and scattershot to count as a real system of ideas. Steve Bannon’s version of populism seems significantly more focused, more self-conscious, and hence more open to theory-based critical analysis, which this paper attempts to provide. That is not at all to say, however, that Bannon’s ideas achieve intellectual coherence or consistency. Close examination of the defining components of his worldview suggest the opposite. Still, engagement with contemporary right-populism cannot, or should not, avoid Bannon (...) and his attempts to cook up a new ideology. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a major revival of interest in the political philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Thinkers have looked to Kant's theories about knowledge, history, the moral self and autonomy, and nature and aesthetics to seek the foundations of their own political philosophy. This volume, written by established authorities on Kant as well as by new scholars in the field, illuminates the ways in which contemporary thinkers differ regarding Kantian philosophy and Kant's legacy to political and ethical theory. (...) The book contains essays by Patrick Riley, Lewis White Beck, Mary Gregor, and Richard L. Velkley that place Kant in the tradition of political philosophy; chapters by Dieter Henrich, Susan Shell, Michael W. Doyle, and Joseph M. Knippenberg that examine Kantian perspectives on history and politics; contributions by William A. Galston, Bernard Yack, William James Booth, and Ronald Beiner that judge the Kantian legacy; and classic discussions by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Hans-Georg Gadamer that present different perspectives on contemporary debates about Kant. (shrink)

What is citizenship? This question goes back to the political philosophy of Aristotle, and how one answers it will be decisive in determining one's vision of political life. In the last ten to fifteen years, the question of citizenship has aroused a renewed set of extremely lively debates within political philosophy, and Iris Marion Young has certainly occupied an important place within these theoretical debates. In particular, Young—especially in her seminal article, Polity and Group Difference: A critique of the ideal (...) of universal citizenship—has presented a sharp challenge to all political theorists who are in some broad sense intellectually nourished by the tradition of civic republicanism and who think about the theme of citizenship under the influence of civic‐republican conceptions. In essence, Young's argument is that the practices of contemporary liberal society show that the implicit normative promise contained in the idea of a universal citizen identity has not been fulfilled, and therefore we must rethink this notion from the ground up. The purpose of my essay is to review the arguments that constitute Young's challenge to the civic‐republican tradition, with a view to clarifying the following questions: Is Young's political theory aimed at a reconstruction of the idea of citizenship on a normatively more sound basis? Or does her project imply a rejection of the idea of citizenship, and its displacement by an alternative understanding of political membership? (shrink)

​Hannah Arendt liked to present herself in the image of a thinker who had jettisoned the grand metaphysical ambitions of the Western philosophical tradition. In this, Arendt anticipated later “anti-foundationalist” themes in what came to be called post-modernist theory. Arendt even went so far as to resist the notion that she was a philosopher at all. In my view this self-understanding was way off the mark. Juxtaposing her idea of “judging” in the posthumously-published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy with a (...) classic conception of judgment from the Western philosophy canon – namely Aristotle’s key notion of phronesis, practical wisdom – demonstrates that Arendt easily matches the metaphysical ambitions of the philosophical tradition. For a thinker like Arendt, chucking off philosophy turns out to be easier said than done. In fact, properly appreciating the judging idea in the Kant Lectures conducts us into the very centre of Arendt’s political philosophy. (shrink)

In the last few years, there has been a notable surge of interest in the themes of civil religion and the battle against “priestcraft” among historians of political thought. Examples include Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic; Paul Rahe’s Against Throne and Altar; Jeffrey Collins’s The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes; Jonathan Israel’s work on the legacy of Spinoza; Justin Champion’s work on John Toland; and my own book, Civil Religion. Within the intellectual space created by this recent scholarship, this article focuses (...) on relevant themes in the work of the one of the two thinkers who J.G.A. Pocock identified as most responsible for the “implantation of the values of civic humanism in English political thought” – namely, James Harrington (the other being the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury). (shrink)

The liberal political morality developed in Will Kymlicka's Liberalism, Community and Culture is in various respects stronger and more coherent than many theories of Kymlicka's liberal predecessors and contemporaries, but it still suffers from important weaknesses that characterize other liberalisms. By ridding liberal theory of unnecessary defects, Kymlicka helps to clarify why even a liberalism capable of repelling the communitarian challenge will continue to be subject to theoretical criticism.

Ronald S Laura, Michael Leahy; Religious Upbringing and Rational Autonomy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 253–265, h.

The New Social Disease is about how we personalize our computers and associated technologies while depersonalizing others and ourselves.

I propose to show that the use that has often been made of wittgenstein's work in the philosophy of religion is innocuous. the notion that the meaning of a word or a sentence is the use to which it is put has been exploited in such a way that it neither does justice to religious belief nor to wittgenstein's thought. i endeavour to show that the burden of the positivist programme was not to withold from religious language the accolade of (...) 'meaning'. it was to show that no piece of language could be both meaningful and true (or false) which did not satisfy the conditions of either the analytic or the synthetic category. i conclude that wittgenstein's work can provide an effective liberation from positivism if it can be shown that wittgenstein gives us sufficient reason to reject the analytic-synthetic distinction not only as an inadequate criterion of 'meaning', but as an inadequate criterion of 'truth' as well. (shrink)

The Daoist–Buddhist syncretism movement helped popularize Buddhism, which in turn enabled monks to exercise social influence. Such influence eventually contributed to the four major Buddhist persecutions in China and further shaped the development of Buddhist philosophy in East Asia. This chapter indicates the shift from Indian and Central Asian to Chinese founders, which is not only an ethnic change but a doctrinal one. The philosophies of these East Asian Mahāyāna schools and the Zhenyan tradition are described in the chapter. The (...) traditions discussed include New Sanlun, Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land, Chan, and Faxiang traditions. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of current knowledge about the relationship between mental illness, violence, homicides, and suicides, with a view towards crafting sensible public policy options for reducing gun violence towards self or others. With this knowledge as a backdrop, the limitations of the federal National Instant Background Check System as both over-inclusive and under-inclusive in identifying people with mental illness who pose potential risks are discussed. Finally, the article describes emerging approaches for identifying and removing firearms from persons (...) who pose potential risks of gun violence towards self or others, including Extreme Risk Protection Orders and other options. (shrink)

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.--Harvard University, 1985).

The authors of this book show that the failure of public health arises, not from a failure of contemporary medicine, but from a failure of the philosophical assumptions upon which it rests. They suggest an alternative approach to health care that derives from a ecological and holistic philosophy of nature.