----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Brooke" <chris.brooke at magdalen.oxford.ac.uk>
> I'm told that Harvard political philosopher John Rawls died yesterday,
> peacefully.
>
> More reporting, doubtless, to follow.
>
> Chris
==============================
Philosopher John Rawls Dead at 81
Monday November 25, 2002 11:30 PM
BOSTON, Mass. (AP) - John Rawls, a giant of 20th century philosophy who revived the study of ethics and became an intellectual hero of liberalism, has died. He was 81.
Rawls is best known for his 1971 book ``A Theory of Justice,'' which revived the idea of the social compact. Each person, he argued, is entitled to certain rights that cannot be overridden even in the interests of society as a whole.
His ideas revolutionized philosophy by returning it to questions of right and wrong, rescuing it from a preoccupation with the questions of logic and the philosophy of science that had come to dominate the field.
``His work is not going to be forgotten for decades, I think for centuries,'' said Hilary Putnam, his colleague in Harvard University's philosophy department for 35 years.
Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn confirmed that Rawls died Sunday but could not provide further details. Rawls had suffered a series of strokes starting in the mid-1990s, though he continued to publish until last year.
His colleagues said Rawls' greatest contribution may have been reviving the study of ethics in philosophy, forcing it to confront head-on questions of freedom, liberty and responsibility.
``He connected philosophy with democracy,'' said Joshua Cohen, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former student.
Rawls believed that the ideal society should be constructed according to a relatively straightforward principle that came to be known as the ``Rawls test'': Would the best off accept the arrangements if they believed at any moment they might find themselves in the place of the worst off?
Slavery, for instance, would not pass the test as slave owners could not in good faith say they would prefer the arrangements if the roles were reversed.
That idea and others helped revive the concept of the social compact - a bond of rights and obligations linking all people. As such, Rawls' work ``systematized a great deal of liberal thought about what a just constitution is and what a just society is,'' Putnam said.
Born in Baltimore, Rawls received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton University. Tall and athletic, he was once offered a minor league baseball contract.
He served an infantryman in the Pacific during World War II. There he came to appreciate man's capacity for evil, but throughout his life maintained what he called ``realistic utopianism,'' or optimism that mankind could better itself - and not just in theory.
Rawls joined Harvard's philosophy department in 1962 and was given the title of ``university professor,'' Harvard's highest teaching post, in 1979. His works included ``Political Liberalism'' (1993) and ``Justice as Fairness: A Restatement'' (2001).
The fruits of his labor are visible in Harvard's philosophy department, which is now evenly divided between ethicists and metaphysicists - something unimaginable before Rawls, Putnam noted. And at Harvard and elsewhere, Cohen said, a generation of moral philosophers were trained at his feet.
Perhaps most notably, Putnam said, Rawls ``didn't just think about how to do good and be good, but he seemed to exemplify in his own life doing good and being good.''
``His personal goodness was just astonishing,'' Putnam said.