Pre-Liberal Political Philosophy

Rawls and Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-90-04-52024-0
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 178 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 439 g

Reihe: Studies in Moral Philosophy

John Rawls is the most influential 20th century political philosopher, but critics have complained about the ahistorical character of his approach. The purpose of this book is to argue that these critics are, at best, only half correct.Pre-Liberal Political Philosophy concentrates on four pre-liberal thinkers who are major figures in the history of philosophy and who are surprisingly formative in the development of Rawls’s mature political philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.

Several illuminating connections are drawn between Rawls’s political liberalism and Plato’s contrasting appeal to the “noble lie” in politics, between Rawls’s overall method of reflective equilibrium and Aristotle’s dialectic, between Rawls’s opposition to merit in the distribution of wealth and Augustine’s similar anti-Pelagian stance, and between Rawls’s view of a just society as a common good of common goods and the natural law dimension of Aquinas’s philosophy. In general, the distance between Rawlsian abstraction and his historical embeddedness is lessened considerably.

Autoren/Hrsg.

A Dombrowski, Daniel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Mittelalterliche & Scholastische Philosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Theorie, Politische Philosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie

Über Autor(innen)

Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of twenty books and over one hundred and eighty articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature. Among his books are Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).