Williams (an old teacher of mine when he was at Cambs) wrote a couple things in political phil (the equality paper, mainly), but his important work in moral philosophy is late 70s and after, back in the 60s he was doing mainly phil of mind. Besides, he's sort of scattershot, very brilliant, but he wouldn't have pretensions to be a Rawls. Foot did interesting work in moral, not political philosophy on a smallish scale. Geach is mainly a philosopher of logic and language, I can't even think of any ethical work, much less political work he's done. Hare, less said the better. If I want utilitarianism, I'll look to Richard Brandt, or, if I am feeling technical, to Gibabrd, Harsanyi, etc. MacIntyre did no important work in morala nd political philosophy in the 50s and 60s, though his big project didn't raelly roll till the end of the 70s (After Virtue), but I don't think anyone outside the marxist left (in Britain) paid attewntion to the philosophy he did then (worse for him and us). Long and short is that none of these figures, individually or collectively, had the weight of Rawls, or do now, even if you take ToJ out of the equationa nd consider only the papers. Rawls is really that important.
jks
--- Chris Brooke <chris.brooke at magdalen.oxford.ac.uk>
wrote:
> 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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