Suchergebnisse

InPolitical Liberalism, John Rawls employs a distinctive method of "political constructivism" to establish his well-known principles of justice, arguing that his principles are suited to bridge the ineradicable pluralism of liberal societies and so to ground an "overlapping consensus." Setting aside the question of whether Rawls's method supports his principles, I argue that he does not adequately defend reliance on this particular method rather than alternatives. If the goal of Rawls's "political" philosophy is to derive principles that are able to overcome liberal pluralism, then another and simpler method should be employed. The "method of convergence" would develop liberal principles directly from the convergence of comprehensive views in existing societies, and so give rise to quite different moral principles.

This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

If evaluators do not borrow from the natural and social sciences for their methods, what do their enquiries look like? Many who seek to answer that question pursue naturalistic or case study or qualitative approaches, conceived of as a reaction to scientism to produce a more faithful response to the social and political nature of the world being evaluated. Among those approaches is constructivism, familiar in the philosophy of science, science education and psychology. This is a general critique of science for its failure to acknowledge that theories and realities are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered or uncovered, but are constructed in the minds of individuals or in the discourses of groups. This article looks critically at constructivism as it has appeared in the field of evaluation and presents it as an overreaction to the problems of objective reality.

Many normative theorists have advocated constructivism as a way of overcoming skepticism and nihilism. They have produced three types of constructivism that correspond to three conceptions of rationality: formal (Hare and Gewirth), instrumental (Gauthier), and ideal (Rawls). In this book, T.K. Seung examines these three types and vindicates Rawls' claim that only the constructivism of ideal rationality - which accepts Kantiam ideals as its basis - is viable. Unlike Rawls, however, Seung traces Kantian ideas to Platonic forms. Without this Platonic move, he shows, ideal constructivism cannot avoid collapsing to normative positivism. Seung maintains that Platonic forms are the obects of normative intuition and that they are only schematic ideas and principles that must be articulated into a system of concrete normative standards. This process of articulation is normative construction. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that constructivism and intuitionism are in competition with each other, Seung demonstrates the necessity of their natural dependence. That is, their happy union alone can provide a secure foundation for normative theories and save them from the twin evils of scepticism and nihilism

This book contains seminal discussions of central issues in the philosophy of language, mathematics, mind, religion and time. Is common language conceptually prior to idiolectics? What is a theory of meaning? Does constructivism provide a satisfactory account of mathematics? What are indefinitely extensible concepts? Can we change the past? These are only some of the very important questions addressed here. Both the papers written by the contributors and Dummett's replies provide a great wealth of stimulating ideas for those who currently do research in the respective areas touched upon without making the reading exceedingly tedious. This feature, common to most of the papers in this book, makes it possible to use the material presented in undergraduate courses at university level