Wow! eBook
Politics and Metaphysics in Kant
Author(s): Sorin Baiasu (Author, Editor), Sami Pihlstrom (Editor), Howard Williams (Editor)
- Publisher: University of Wales Press
- Publication Date: 30 Jun. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 0708323774
- ISBN-13: 9780708323779
Book Description
The past three decades have witnessed the emergence, at the forefront of political thought, of several Kantian theories. Both the critical reaction to consequentialism inspired by Rawlsian constructivism and the universalism of more recent theories informed by Habermasian discourse ethics trace their main sources of inspiration back to Kant’s writings. Yet much of what is Kantian in contemporary theory is formulated with more or less strict caveats concerning Kant’s metaphysics. These range from radical claims that theories of justice must be political, not metaphysical, to more cautious calls for replacing Kant’s metaphysics with a more modest ontology, for instance, one informed by the relatively recent linguistic turn in philosophy. The volume will consist of thirteen state-of-the-art essays which explore the relationship between politics and metaphysics in Kant and Kantian political philosophy. All essays will be published for the first time in this volume and will be preceded by an Introduction from the editors. Given the current legitimation crisisA” of modern liberal democracies, the purpose of the collection as a whole is to revisit the question concerning the role of metaphysics in moral and political philosophy and to suggest new perspectives on the question of legitimation.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This excellent volume is a welcome and quite distinctive addition to political philosophy generally as well as to our understanding of Kant and Kantian approaches to political problems. The book s thirteen essays, including a substantive editor s introduction, collectively serve to probe the importance of metaphysics for grounding political principles and applying those principles to concrete political and moral issues in the contemporary context of pluralism and diversity. –Mark Timmons, University of Arizona
About the Author
Dr Baiasu and Professors Philstrom and Williams are all well known and published authors within this field. Howard Williams is also general editor of the Political Philosophy Now series.
