It is fashionable nowadays to discredit the theory of the general will, and an attempt to rehabilitate it is not likely to receive much sympathy. Nevertheless, I propose to give some reasons for adopting a more lenient attitude towards the theory, and to indicate some possible lines along which a rehabilitation might be conducted.

There is among many moral philosophers today a renewed emphasis on the connection between reason and morality, and an attempt to exhibit moral behaviour as characteristically rational. What is original in Mr. Kneale's extremely interesting paper is the following-up of a suggestion that certain words like “right,” “wrong,” “ought,” are used in the same way both by lawyers and by moralists; this leads to a logical rehabilitation of the somewhat unpopular concept of the moral law, which in turn argues objectivity (...) and rationality in morals, and makes it possible “to distinguish between good and bad moralists in much the same way as we can distinguish between good and bad lawyers.” The legal pattern is essentially the same as the moral pattern. (shrink)

: Ofelia Schutte's relationship to Nietzsche is contentious. Sometimes she identifies him as an ally. Sometimes she calls him an enemy. Appealing to Nietzsche's abolition of the appearance reality distinction and to his discussions of women as skeptics, I turn to Ofelia's discussions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo to suggest that their protests can be understood as a Nietzschean politics of transvaluation where the myth of the mother and the materialities of women's bodies become the ground (...) of the demand for justice. (shrink)

Ofelia Schutte's relationship to Nietzsche is contentious. Sometimes she identifies him as an ally. Sometimes she calls him an enemy. Appealing to Nietzsche's abolition of the appearance reality distinction and to his discussions of women as skeptics, I turn to Ofelia's discussions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo to suggest that their protests can be understood as a Nietzschean politics of transvaluation where the myth of the mother and the materialities of women's bodies become the ground of (...) the demand for justice. (shrink)

During a prostate exam, Mr. Watson, age 65, learns that his prostate appears to be abnormal. The family physician conducting the exam, Dr. Kleinman, informs Mr. Watson that he may have prostate cancer. Mr. Watson agrees to a variety of tests, including blood tests, bone scans, ultrasound scanning, and a biopsy. After learning about this possible diagnosis and these tests, Mr. Watson surfs the Web for information about prostate cancer and gathers data from many different sources, including the National Cancer (...) Society, the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University, the Mayo Clinic, and medicine sites. He also searches for information from medical journals using MEDLINE, visits several chat rooms on prostate cancer, and joins some e-mail lists. He arrives in Dr. Kleinman's office for a follow-up appointment with a stack of material and many questions. Dr. Kleinman is surprised, irritated, and offended. He recommends that Mr. Watson have a prostatectomy followed by radiation, but Mr. Watson does not want this operation. He would rather receive a form of radiation therapy recently approved by the FDA that he learned about through his own research. Dr. Kleinman admits that he does not know much about this new treatment, but he says that he would read up on it and consult an oncologist. (shrink)

Although political theory was pronounced dead only a few short years ago, this collection of articles shows that much life is left in contemporary political theory. Based on a symposium concerning human rights held at the Sixth World Congress of the International Political Science Association held at Geneva in 1964, the collection includes papers by Macpherson, Polin, Chapman, Cranston, Raphael, Mayo, Schneider, and Fawcett. Macpherson and Polin set the context by exploring the concept of rights in Hobbes and Locke. (...) While the other papers have an eye on traditional discussions, they are also concerned with exploring what "rights" does and can mean in the contemporary world. The international gathering of authors brings together diverse points of view on the common problem of human rights.--R. J. B. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Oakeshott, Weldon, Macdonald, Rees, Quinton, Mayo, Bambrough, Gaillie, Williams and Laslett. The preface describes this work as representative of the effort to recover the area of politics and society for philosophy. With the exception of essays by Oakeshott, Gaillie and Laslett, the writings are fairly routine applications of the analytic philosophical position to questions related to politics; these applications might just as easily have been made by anyone familiar with the literature of analytic philosophy. (...) Gaillie, in the most stimulating piece of the group, attempts to show that contemporary society is possessed of a double moral personality in which eighteenth century liberalism and modern socialism are found coexistent in the same individual.--J. E. B. (shrink)