Suchergebnisse

Factualism, the explanatory requirement, and agency5 Hybrid theories; Building normative reasons out of motivating reasons; Building motivating reasons out of normative reasons; The identity thesis; 6 Constitutivism; Activities and aims; Hedonism; Action and knowledge; The knowledge constraint; Constitutivism and knowledge; Shmaction and shmagency; Constitutivism and error; The magic of constitutivism; 7 Anscombean views; Why?; The structure of action; Naïve action theory; Actions and facts; Keeping score; Activity and normativity; Conclusion; Notes; Further reading; Bibliography; Index.

According to the democratic interpretation of public reason, political justification ought to appeal to the tacit dimension or common sense of society's actual historical moment. This article claims that a consequence of this interpretation is that religious reasons can be stable public reasons. More specifically, it claims that religious reasons can be public reasons in pervasively religious communities that are democratic, even in circumstances of ongoing social secularization. Three theoretical consequences are derived from this claim: first, democratic public reason assumes more social integration than other interpretations of public reason; second, religious reasons are not always inaccessible to non-believers; and third, religious reasons, when public reasons, can have normative force upon non-believers. Additionally, the following practical implication is made explicit: while justification of state power can appeal to religious reasons only, the law cannot be written in religious terms.

Acknowledgments; Introduction by James Gouinlock; First Edition Contents; Chapter I: The Basis of Art in Instinct and Experience; Chapter II: Rationality of Industrial Art; Chapter III: Emergence of Fine Art; Chapter IV: Music; Chapter V: Speech and Signification; Chapter VI: Poetry and Prose; Chapter VII: Plastic Construction; Chapter VIII: Plastic Representation; Chapter IX: Justification of Art; Chapter X: The Criterion of Taste; Chapter XI: Art and Happiness; Chronology; Appendix; Variants to the Text of Reason in Art; Editorial Appendix; Explanation of the Editorial Appendix.

Normative reasons have become a popular theoretical tool in recent decades. One helpful feature of normative reasons is their weight. The fourteen new essays in this book theorize about many different aspects of weight. Topics range from foundational issues to applications of weight in debates across philosophy.

This dissertation looks at the linked issues of justification and public reason – under what conditions do political authorities count as legitimate, and what is the appropriate mode of reasoning together in the public sphere? The main contender in the field currently is Rawls's political liberalism. His conception of justification gives a key role to the justifiability of political power to each citizen, based on shared (because mutually acceptable) reasons. This approach to justification affects how we reason in the public sphere – in discussing certain fundamental issues, Rawlsian public reason requires limiting our reasons to public ones (viz., those which others could reasonably endorse), and bracketing those based on disputed conceptions of the good. How we think about justification thus has concrete implications for how we live together in political society. Rawls's political liberalism is commonly pitted against comprehensive liberalism. The disagreement tends to be cast as being about comprehensive liberals rejecting the need for justifiability. I argue that this is mistaken, and that Rawls shares more than we might think with the comprehensive liberal. Taking Raz as the modern champion of comprehensive liberalism, I show that both Rawls and Raz are deeply committed to justifiability, and trace the disagreement between the two to a metaphysical dispute about how to conceive of the project of justifying the implementation of political principles. In light of their shared commitment to justifiability, the question becomes whether justifiability requires shared reasons. I propose a heuristic reading of Rawls's requirement of mutually acceptable reasons, which explains how Rawls's and Raz's views on justification can be brought together without needing to bracket the truth of the principles of justice. This proposed reconciliation leads to a mode of reasoning in the public sphere that does not require setting aside non-public reasons in order to proceed.

Reason and Democracy breaks new ground in providing a plausible philosophical basis for the communitarian view of a healthy democracy as the rational pursuit of common purposes by free and equal citizens. Thomas A. Spragens Jr. argues that the most persistent paradigms of Western political rationality originated in classical philosophy, took their modern expression in the philosophies of Kant and Mill, and terminated in Max Weber's pairing of purely technical rationality with arbitrary ends.Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language, combined with approp