John Rawls, RIP

Chris Brooke chris.brooke at magdalen.oxford.ac.uk
Tue Nov 26 11:31:57 PST 2002


On 26/11/02 6:58 pm, "andie nachgeborenen" <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:


>It's no myth that Rawls--and I didn't, most explicitly, say
>it started with ToJ in 1971 but earlier with his work
>of the 1950s--jump-started the discussion of both
>moral and political philosophy in the English speaking
>countries.

I prefer this claim that the earlier articles by Rawls had an important impact on contemporary moral philosophy to the one I hear more often, especially here in Oxford, which argues for 1971 as marking the moment when the discipline underwent rebirth, blah blah blah, all thanks to one book.

But even so: the happy transformation of academic moral philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s was the work of many hands -- Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Geach, R. M. Hare (perhaps not), and so on. Plenty of philosophers were becoming dissatisfied with behaviourism, emotivism, logical postivism and utilitarianism, along with the (relatively) Young Rawls.

However excellent "Two Concepts of Rules" and its successor articles were (and are), were they sufficiently important to sustain the Rawls-o-centric narrative of the development of postwar moral and political philosophy to which the Rawlsians often seem to be rather firmly wedded?

Chris



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