On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:10:31 -0800 (PST) andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
> Rawls is a very dull writer, in the tradition of
> Dewey. As for the cliches, well sorry, it was 12 am
> when I got back fromw orking amd I wasn't up to
> sparkle when I discovered than one of my intellectual
> heroes has gone.
>
> It is difficult to transport oneself back to the
> situation where Rawls found moral and political
> philosophy in America in the early 50s. Moral
> philosophy was concerned pretty much exclusively with
> the study of the meaning of ethical language.
That was the Anglophone take on the implications of logical empiricism for moral and political philosophy. Bertrand Russell for instance certainly wrote a good deal on politics but when he did so, he insisted that he was writing in his capacity as a citizen rather than in his professional capacity as a philosopher.
In Austria when logical positivism first arose back in the 1920s and 1930s, it appeared (especially in the hands of Otto Neurath and to a lesser extent Rudolf Carnap) as a politically oriented project. Neurath and Carnap in their manifesto "The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle" explicitly linked their project to the socialist tradition, including Marxism. The positivist battle against metaphysics was seen as essential for clearing the way for social reconstruction.
When logical positivism was first introduced into the US in the late 1930s, it was taken up by a number of leftist intellectuals including Sidney Hook, as well as by some people who were then close to the CPUSA. Hook in particular at that time hit it off well with Neurath when he visited the US. But by the mid-1940s the political radicalism that had originally accompanied logical positivism in the US had been dropped and philosophers were now using the doctrine of emotivism to argue for the fundamentally apolitical nature of philosophy. Philosophers were now arguing that the proper subjects of moral and political philosophy were analyses of the cognitive status of moral and political language. While philosophers might as private citizens have political commitments, it was argued that these had nothing to do with their work as philosophers. Scientific philosophy was seen as a value-free subject.
The fact that this shift in outlook among analytical philosophers coincided with the rise of McCarthyism seems to have been more than a coincidence IMO. Philosophers were among the academics who were hardest hit by the anti-red purges of the universities.
>To the
> extent that anyone discussed right and wrong, all
> there was was utilitarianism. There was no political
> philosophy, zip, zero, nothing. There was Isaiah
> Berlin, but he felt he had to leave philosophy to do
> political philosophy. Rawls' work, first in papers
> like Two Concepts of Rules and (later) Justice as
> Fairness, put moral philosophy that people could care
> about back on the map, created a space where real
> issues could be discussed (laying the groundwork for
> "applied ethics" and journals like Philosophy and
> Public Affairs), and eorked on an alternative to
> utilitarianism.
Just as I think it was more than a accident that the abandonment of political philosophy coincided with the McCarthy period, I think it is more than a coincidence that the revival of political philosophy began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the campus protests.
>
> Then came The Book: A Theory of Justice (1971). All of
> us who do moral and political philosophy live in its
> shadow (or maybe its light). Political philosophy
> since has been (a) lively, and (b) a series of
> responses to, comments on, and criticisms of ToJ.
> These points are connected. It's generally agreed that
> Rawls' detailed argument in ToJ doesn't work, but his
> method is very important--I don't mean the Original
> Position, etc., that's the stuff that doesn't work.
> Rawls showed how to develop and apply the
> neopragmatist "epistemology" implicit in the
> philosophy of science of his colleagues Quine and
> Goodman to ethics in the method of reflective
> equilibrium, thsu sttating the correct theory of
> knowledge and justification for the first time in
> human history. It's also widely thought that even if
> Rawls' derivation doesn't work, his "two principles of
> justice" (mysteriously so called, because there are
> three of them), are pretty much right, or at least a
> pretty good approximation to the truth.
I would agree that the strongest aspect of Rawls' work was his development of the notion of reflective equilibrium with its application of Quine & Goodmans' Duhemian holism to moral and political philosophy. What this neo-pragmatist epistemology is a good dose of Marxist historicism though.
>
>
>
> Rawls was never an activist, but while 70s radicals
> attacked him as being a defender of welfare state
> capitalism, this was not correct. He was politically
> progressive. He considered the only choices of
> economic order that comported with justice to be
> either (1) market socialism, or (2) what he called
> property owning democracy (in Marxist lingo, petty
> commodity production). Rodney Peffer wrote a fine book
> arguing in one long section that (1) was the Rawlsian
> way to go. Robert Brenner once told me that Rawls,
> whom he knew well, was personally quite radical, but
> tempentally incapable of waving banners or (say)
> joining PL, as his colleague Hilary Putnam did for a
> while.
Rodney Peffer as I recall attempted to combine a Rawlsian theory of justice with a Marxist social analysis, and thus draw socialist conclusions. However, his position IMO suffers because he did not sufficiently query Rawls' epistemoology in the light of Marxism.
>
>
> Anyway, let me sum up my saying that he was far and
> away the most important Anglo-American, indeed,
> Euro-American, political philosopher of the last
> century; only Habermas (with whom he has a number of
> important similarities, bad writing not least among
> them), could rival him. (I do not denigrate Lukacs and
> Gramsci, but because of the failure of the Bolshevik
> and Eurocommunist projects, their importance is
> lesser.)
Gramsci with his somewhat Peircian consensus theory of truth seems to have anticipated Rawls' notion of reflective equilibrium.
>I think Putnam is not wrong to suggest that
> his work will be read for centuries. Everone who knew
> hima lso says he was a really wonderful human being. I
> never met him myself.
I actually once saw Rawls speak, over fifteen years ago at Boston University. Rawls very rarely if ever, gave any sort of public lecture or talks. In this case, a philosophy professor at Boston University invited Rawls to speak before his class. The students were warned not tell anyone outside of the class, that Rawls was coming to speak. Since a cousin of mine was taking this class, I decided that I couldn't pass up the oppurtunity to hear his speak. Apparently, many other people had the same idea, since despite the warning to students not to publicize Rawls' visit, the classroom was quite naturally packed with loads of people coming to hear Rawls.
When Rawls first began to speak, the most notable thing was his very pronounced stammer (which no doubt accounted for his antipathy to public speaking). However, once he got himself going, his stammer would lessen, as he developed his train of thought. As I recall he addressed student questions on matters relating to relativism in political philosophy (the questions having been submitted in writing to the professor who gave them to Rawls) and Rawls presented thoughts that he was to develop at length in his later writings.
Jim F.
>
> jks
>
>
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> > andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > >A great one gone. He left the world a better place
> > than when he
> > >found it. We are all in his debt.
> >
> > We are? I never felt the debt. From what I've read,
> > it seems like an
> > industrial strength supply of tedium, and what I've
> > heard from fans
> > doesn't sound any more impressive. Could you explain
> > why he's so
> > important that you'd string together three obituary
> > cliches in his
> > honor?
> >
> > Doug
>
>
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