Originally published: Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. With new pref.

In The Responsibility of Reason, Ralph C. Hancock undertakes no less than to answer the Heideggerian challenge.

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

Pierre Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and is outspoken public intellectual in France. His book La loi naturelle et les dro...

The question of Calvin's influence on modern political thought is a mine that has been so thoroughly worked that one would have expected it by now to be exhausted. Yet Ralph Hancock has not only uncovered and dug out a new vein of ore, but managed to show that some of the ore previously extracted contains a sizeable admixture of fool's gold. To specialists in intellectual history this is doubtless a significant accomplishment; others may see it as the (...) sort of modest contribution characteristic of a decent doctoral dissertation. (shrink)

Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of what it is for states of mind and processes of thought to count as rational. Whether you are thinking rationally depends purely on what is going on in your mind, but rational thinking is a means to the goal of getting things right in your thinking, by believing the truth or making good choices.

This article explores Foucault’s two different notions of power: one where the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations and another that emphasizes how power is a central feature of human action. By drawing out these two conceptualizations of power, Foucault’s work contributes three critical points to the formation of medicalized subjectivities: the issue of medicalization needs to be discussed both in terms of both specific practices and holistically ; we need to think how we as human beings are “disciplined” and (...) “subjectivated” through medicalization, as discourses, practices, and institutions are all crystallizations of power relations; and we need to reflect on how we can “resist” this process of subjectification, since “power comes from below” and patients shape themselves through “technologies of the self.” Ultimately, Foucault’s work does not merely assist us in refining our analysis; rather, it is essential for conceptualizing medicalization in contemporary society. (shrink)

This is a review, by Sebastian Schmidt, of Ralph Wedgwood's The Value of Rationality (Oxford University Press, 2017).

In this book, renowned philosopher Ralph McInerny sets out to review what Thomas meant by the phrase and to defend a robust understanding of Thomas's teaching on the subject.

CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM OF ANALOGY "Let lu start with a review of the theories of other thinkers; for the proofs of a theory are difficulties for the contrary ...

Extensive and profound as philosophic speculation on the nature of knowledge may have been during the last twenty-five centuries, it must be conceded that it has, on the whole, failed in its undertaking. In fact, we do not seem to be much closer to the solution of the epistemological problem than were Kant and Hegel or, for that matter, Plato and Aristotle. Obviously enough, the problem should now be approached in some new way, perhaps one growing out of recent scientific (...) findings. (shrink)

Many centuries ago, at the very beginning of the systematic development of philosophy, Plato declared that the thinker's domain comprises “the wholeness of things;” and indeed, the earlier thinkers took all knowledge for their province and did not hesitate to discuss problems now referred to art, psychology, economics, mathematics, or physics. Since then the meaning of philosophy has appreciably changed, however, and the intellectual descendants of the great founder of the Academy no longer claim the monopoly of all fields of (...) study. For there appeared in the meantime a mighty competitor—or should we say a partner?—in the pursuit of truth, namely, science. (shrink)