The description for this book, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, will be forthcoming.

_The Contradictions of Modern Moral Philosophy_ is a highly original and radical critique of contemporary moral theory. Paul Johnston demonstrates that much recent moral philosophy is confused about the fundamental issue of whether there are correct moral judgements. He shows that the standard modern approaches to ethics cannot justify - or even make much sense of - traditional moral beliefs. Applied rigorously, these approaches suggest that we should reject ethics as a set of outdated and misguided claims. Rather than facing (...) up to this conclusion, most recent moral philosophy consists of attempts to find some ways of preserving moral beliefs. This places a contradiction at the heart of moral philosophy. As a resilt it is often impossible to tell whether a contemporary philosopher ultimately rejects or endorses the idea of objective right and wrong. On the basis of a Wittgenstein approach Paul Johnston puts forward an alternative account of ethics that avoids this contradiction and recognises that the central issues of ethics cannot be resolved by conceptual analysis. He then uses this account to highlight the contradictions of important contemporary moral theorists such as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (shrink)

Liberalism, the founding philosophy of many constitutional democracies, has been criticized in recent years from both the left and the right for placing too much faith in individual rights and distributive justice. In this book, David Johnston argues for a reinterpretation of liberal principles he contends will restore liberalism to a position of intellectual leadership from which it can guide political and social reforms. He begins by surveying the three major contemporary schools of liberal political thought--rights-based, perfectionist, and political liberalism--and, (...) by weeding out their weaknesses, sketches a new approach he calls humanist liberalism. The core of Johnston's humanist liberalism is the claim that the purpose of political and social arrangements should be to empower individuals to be effective agents. Drawing on and modifying the theories of John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, Amartya Sen, and others, Johnston explains how this purpose can be realized in a world in which human beings hold fundamentally different conceptions of the ends of life. His humanist liberalism responds constructively to feminist, neo-Marxist, and other criticisms while remaining faithful to the core values of the liberal tradition. (shrink)

The idea of the Inner is central to our concept of a person and yet is far from being philosophically understood. This book offers a comprehensive account of Wittgenstein's work on the subject and presents a forceful challenge to contemporary views. Written in a non-technical and accessible style, it throws new light both on Wittgenstein's work and on the problem of the Inner self.

_A Brief History of_ _Justice_ traces the development of the idea of justice from the ancient world until the present day, with special attention to the emergence of the modern idea of social justice. An accessible introduction to the history of ideas about justice Shows how complex ideas are anchored in ordinary intuitions about justice Traces the emergence of the idea of social justice Identifies connections as well as differences between distributive and corrective justice Offers accessible, concise introductions to the (...) thought of several leading figures and schools of thought in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract Hayek assailed the idea of social justice by arguing that any effort to realize it would transform society into an oppressive organization, stißing liberty. Hayek's view is marred by two omissions. First, he fails to consider that the goal of social justice, like the goal of wealth generation, might be promoted by strategies of indirection that do not entail oppressive organization. Second, he underestimates the tendency of the market order itself to generate oppressive organization, and consequently sees advantages in (...) the market order that it may not possess. (shrink)

Hayek claimed that the idea of social justice is meaningless in a market economy because in that context, no identifiable agent intentionally brings about the distribution of wealth. But the assumption that the existence of injustice entails an identifiable agent of injustice is erroneous. Moreover, Hayek ignores the fact that in a market economy, the broad pattern of economic outcomes is foreseeable even if detailed, person‐by‐person outcomes are not. Hayek's rejection of the idea of social justice reveals a striking naïveté (...) about his own ethical presuppositions. (shrink)

In his 1987 book _Conditionals, Frank Jackson presents an argument to the effect that the indicative conditionals of natural language have the same truth conditions as the material conditional of truth-functional logic. This Jackson refers to as the "paradox of indicative conditionals." I offer a solution to this paradox by arguing that some conditionals that appear to be in the indicative mood are actually subjunctives, to which the paradox does not apply. I support this proposed solution with some historical observations (...) on the evolution of the English verb phrase. (edited). (shrink)

Suppose that John asks, ‘Is the window open?’ and Mary replies, ‘The window is open.’ Then John and Mary have produced two distinct utterances, and in doing so, they have performed two different kinds of speech act. But clearly there is something that these utterances have in common. According to the standard theory of speech acts, in these utterances different illocutionary forces have been applied to the same propositional content. Similarly, if John and Mary both believe that roses are red, (...) the same propositional content is attributed to their individual mental states.The propositional contents of utterances and beliefs have traditionally been identified with propositions. In turn, propositions have been characterized as language-independent particulars that can be re-identified in different contexts. In this article, I will argue that various phenomena that have hitherto been explained by propositions are better understood in terms of propositional acts. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.

More than five hundred years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, his landmark treatise on the pragmatic application of power remains a pivot point for debates on political thought. While scholars continue to investigate interpretations of The Prince in different contexts throughout history, from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento and Italian unification, other fruitful lines of research explore how Machiavelli’s ideas about power and leadership can further our understanding of contemporary political circumstances. With Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict, David Johnston, Nadia (...) Urbinati, and Camila Vergara have brought together the most recent research on The Prince, with contributions from many of the leading scholars of Machiavelli, including Quentin Skinner, Harvey Mansfield, Erica Benner, John McCormick, and Giovanni Giorgini. Organized into four sections, the book focuses first on Machiavelli’s place in the history of political thought: Is he the last of the ancients or the creator of a new, distinctly modern conception of politics? And what might the answer to this question reveal about the impact of these disparate traditions on the founding of modern political philosophy? The second section contrasts current understandings of Machiavelli’s view of virtues in The Prince. The relationship between political leaders, popular power, and liberty is another perennial problem in studies of Machiavelli, and the third section develops several claims about that relationship. Finally, the fourth section explores the legacy of Machiavelli within the republican tradition of political thought and his relevance to enduring political issues. (shrink)

The article provides an example of the application of the techniques and results of historical linguistics to traditional problems in the philosophy of language. It takes as its starting point the dispute about the nature of facts that arose from the 1950 Aristotelian Society debate between J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. It is shown that, in some cases, expressions containing the noun fact refer to actions and events; while in other cases, such expressions do not have a referring (...) function at all. Thus, nothing corresponding to Strawson's 'pseudomaterial correlate' need be postulated in order to account for the reference of the noun fact. It is suggested that many philosophically problematic expressions may be better understood by tracing their historical evolution in natural language. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.

Organized around such themes as equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and equality of result, the selections included in this anthology range from Plato to the present, treating a topic of fundamental importance to political theory.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III.

The thesis presents a development of J. L. Austin's analysis of truth and its accompanying analysis of sentence structure. This involves a discussion and refinement of Austin's notions of the demonstrative and descriptive conventions of language and of the demonstrative and descriptive devices of sentences. The main point of the thesis is that ordinary language must be treated as an historical phenomenon: one that has evolved its more complex features through a long series of variations upon a small number of (...) rudimentary conventions and locutions. The utility of Austin's analysis is shown to lie in the description that it provides of the functions of these rudimentary conventions and locutions. The analysis is used to illuminate a number of problematic sentences and expressions of ordinary language, including identity sentences, definite descriptions, existential sentences, and conditionals. (shrink)

In spite of the shortage in Rawls’s work of references to Smith’s later and even more famous book, the ideas and arguments of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations are central to Rawls’s theory of justice. This article intends to show that without the ideas Smith proposed in The Wealth of Nations, Rawls would not have been able to write A Theory of Justice. Smith’s ideas in The Wealth of Nations supply Rawls with the (...) central question he attempts to answer in his theory of justice. They also supply him with a key component of his answer to that question, a component without which Rawls’s answer to the question would have looked sharply different. Smith’s contributions to the set of ideas on which Rawls drew to formulate his theory of justice are as important to that theory as Kant’s contributions and are more important to Rawls’s theory than the contributions of any thinker other than Kant (with the possible exception of Sidgwick). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V VI.

This book seeks to elucidate the concept of justice, not so much as it is expressed in law courts (retributive and procedural justice) or in state budgets (distributive justice), but as primary justice - what it means and how it can be grounded in the inalienable rights that each human being possesses qua human being. It draws inspiration from two recent works of philosopher Nicolas Wolterstorff, but also from the groundbreaking Islamic initiative of 2007, the Common Word Letter addressed by (...) 138 eminent Muslim scholars and clerics to the pope and all Christian leaders. This document affirmed that the two highest commandments in both Judaism and Christianity are also at the heart of the Islamic tradition - love of God and love of neighbor. In a style that lends itself to the classroom and beyond, the book's six chapters all begin with a case study of justice, so as to emphasize that justice must also be embodied in righteous social, political and economic practices. Along the way, leading contemporary scholars and activists from both traditions urge the reader - Muslim, Christian, or whatever - to look afresh at an age-old conundrum: how do justice and love interact so as to create a world in which everyone finds his or her rightful place? (shrink)

Notice board of current events, such as conferences, publications and media broadcasts linked to Sartre's life, work and intellectual legacy.