Marx's thought about justice is essentialist and dialectical. It has been interpreted in terms of immoralism. It is rather a synthesis of the traditional natural law, based on the Aristotelian concept of nature as the potential for perfection or ideal fulfilment, radically different from the Hobbesian reductionist concept of nature as atomistic and mechanical; of the tradition of dialectics in its German idealist form; and of Feuerbach's humanism. Marx's explicitly realist idea of science reveals 'veiled wage-slavery'. Concentration on the market (...) exchange, to the exclusion of the subsequent exploitative use of labour power, deceives exclusively analytic observers into the belief that there is some justice in capitalism. Marx characterized the proletariat as the 'universal class', capable of bringing about the fulfilment of the human essence in a family-style mode of production , because it is the victim of total injustice . However, he criticized workers for not rising above such bourgeois selfishness as demanding 'a fair wage', which is not even a coherent concept. Capitalism is not only a moral injustice, but an ontological injustice, a violation of the worker's humanity. It is coercion into alienation, fetishism and idolatry. (shrink)

The claim to rationality is disputed by two rival enlightenments, which collided in the dispute between Plato, Socrates and the Sophists, and which Marx united critically. He criticizes the capitalist system immanently as restrictive of production, and its market as not a case of freedom or equality. However, Marx is most concerned with ontological injustice, coerced alienation of the human into being a commodity. He retains Promethean Enlightenment values however: technology, creativity, democracy, which should be economic, participatory and international. Marx (...) criticized Hegel’s rationalization, idealization, ‘transfiguration and glorification’ of private property and the market. But he retains key elements of the idealist notion of human nature: that human is a ‘universal, therefore free being.’ The proletariat, with no other class to exploit, is therefore the philosophical ‘universal class.’ Freedom is class emancipation, justice is common ownership. There is an unwarranted skepticism about the rationality of such values and ideals. Rawls for instance misrepresents them by putting them in the same category as wants or preferences. Ideals, values, and enlightenments can and should be rationally argued over, in dialogue. (shrink)

Mr Pettit has performed a useful service in setting out to explain and evaluate phenomenology, especially the difficult thought of Husserl. His book consists of an analysis of a course of five lectures, The Idea of Phenomenology, a more general essay on Husserl, a criticism of phenomenology as exclusively descriptive, an appeal for a particular methodology in philosophy.

Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire was published in 1950, as the first volume of Ricoeur’s La Philosophie de la Volonté. The whole project has a sweeping range, reflected even in this first volume. It is a philosophy of the will, taking in analysis of concepts of behaviour with a critique of scientific psychology: analysis of our moral experience: of our attitudes to our life and to the whole of reality: of our experience of evil and guilt and our dreams of innocence (...) and hopes of salvation. In the first volume Ricoeur imposes not only phenomenological brackets, examining our experience ‘descriptively’ and not causally, but also eidetic brackets, examining possible behaviour and not actual behaviour. This means that he suspends consideration of ‘the fault’, our experience of evil. This is left to the second volume Finitude et Culpabilité which in two parts, L’Homme Faillible and La Symbolique du Mal analyses the experience of evil, the latter part in a hermeneutic analysis of myth, a subject with which Ricoeur has come to the forefront of recent structuralist debate in his book De l’Interprétation A third volume of the Philosophy of the Will will deal with hermeneutic analysis of ‘transcendence’—of the dream of innocence, the hope of deliverance from evil, as expressed in poetry and myth. (shrink)

Le Volontaire et l’Involontaire was published in 1950, as the first volume of Ricoeur’s La Philosophie de la Volonté. The whole project has a sweeping range, reflected even in this first volume. It is a philosophy of the will, taking in analysis of concepts of behaviour with a critique of scientific psychology: analysis of our moral experience: of our attitudes to our life and to the whole of reality: of our experience of evil and guilt and our dreams of innocence (...) and hopes of salvation. In the first volume Ricoeur imposes not only phenomenological brackets, examining our experience ‘descriptively’ and not causally, but also eidetic brackets, examining possible behaviour and not actual behaviour. This means that he suspends consideration of ‘the fault’, our experience of evil. This is left to the second volume Finitude et Culpabilité which in two parts, L’Homme Faillible and La Symbolique du Mal analyses the experience of evil, the latter part in a hermeneutic analysis of myth, a subject with which Ricoeur has come to the forefront of recent structuralist debate in his book De l’Interprétation A third volume of the Philosophy of the Will will deal with hermeneutic analysis of ‘transcendence’—of the dream of innocence, the hope of deliverance from evil, as expressed in poetry and myth. (shrink)

Professor Herbert Spiegelberg has pointed out that Ricoeur is ‘the best informed French historian of phenomenology’ and French philosophers have had the enormous benefit of his translation of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I. Ricoeur’s introduction to this translation has been included in this volume of writings and gives an inkling of the advantage French students have had over English. One only regrets that it was not possible to include also the summaries and detailed notes which Ricoeur appended to his translation. The (...) collection includes a study of Husserl contributed to Brehier’s history of German philosophy; three articles from the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, two on Husserl’s Ideas II and one on his Crisis of the European Sciences; studies on the Cartesian Meditations from the Revue Philosophique de Louvain and a long study on the important Fifth Cartesian Meditation contributed especially for this volume; a comparison of Kant and Husserl from Kantstudien; an article on existential phenomenology from the Encyclopédie Francaise; and the author’s highly relevant programmatic discussion of the relationship of phenomenology to his own work in progress, the Philosophy of the Will. (shrink)