Presents an historical analysis of social contract theory by considering the works of prominent philosophers.

The latest volume of Leibniz’s “General Political and Historical Correspondence” in the great Berlin-Brandenburg Academy Edition, covering the period May to December 1699, contains a number of letters bearing on Leibniz’s central practical idea—that “universal” justice, rightly conceived, is a positive, other-aiding caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis ; that such justice “contains” or encloses all of the moral virtues; and that it relates to “the common good” or “the perfection of the universe” or “the glory of God”— where these three (...) distinct things are morally equivalent in Leibniz’s usual sense. (shrink)

The text includes fragments of his work that have never before been translated.

Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of Hobbes's Theory of the Will - ABSTRACT: Patrick Riley asks why the post-War Oakeshott stopped speaking of the incoherence of Hobbes’s philosophy of volition, as he had in his Hobbes studies before the War. One answer is that he became more and more sensitive to the necessity of counterbalancing the determinist reading of Hobbes, which tended to be dominant in the 1970s’ Hobbes studies. He cites the example of Thomas Spragens’s The Politics (...) of Motion , according to which the human will appears only as a natural movement in a material universe. Although Jürgen Overhoff’s Theory of the Will advances the view that there is complete coherence in Hobbes’s conception of volition, Riley finds his arguments unconvincing. In the end, Riley declares himself favorable to Oakeshott’s "less satisfactory" interpretation of Hobbes, given the incoherence between the Hobbesian critique of free will, fully developed in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, and the requirements of a political theory of contract in terms of a theory of rational will. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of Nicolas Malebranche's Treatise on Nature and Grace by Patrick Riley. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Patrick Riley traces the forgotten roots of Rousseau's concept to seventeenth-century questions about the justice of God. If He wills that all men be saved, does He have a general will that produces universal salvation? And, if He does not, why does He will particularly" that some men be damned? The theological origin of the "general will" was important to Rousseau himself. He uses the language of divinity bequeathed to him by Pascal, Malebranche, Fenelon, and others to dignify, (...) to elevate, and to "save" politics. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The latest volume of Leibniz’s “General Political and Historical Correspondence” in the great Berlin-Brandenburg Academy Edition, covering the period May to December 1699, contains a number of letters bearing on Leibniz’s central practical idea—that “universal” justice, rightly conceived, is a positive, other-aiding caritas sapientis seu benevolentia universalis ; that such justice “contains” or encloses all of the moral virtues; and that it relates to “the common good” or “the perfection of the universe” or “the glory of God”— where these three (...) distinct things are morally equivalent in Leibniz’s usual sense. (shrink)

Moving from a purely religious rebirth to works grounded in a personal philosophy or aesthetic vocation, the autobiographies considered in this book stand as episodes in a genealogy of conversion.

Twenty-three influential essays on political philosophy, culled from the published riches of the JHIover the past half-century.

Universally regarded as the greatest French political theorist and philosopher of education of the Enlightenment, and probably the greatest French social theorist tout court, Rousseau was an important forerunner of the French Revolution, though his thought was too nuanced and subtle ever to serve as mere ideology. This 2001 volume systematically surveys the full range of Rousseau's activities in politics and education, psychology, anthropology, religion, music and theater.

This article employs postcolonial perspectives to examine the possibilities and limitations of drawing on Pan-African ideas to establish practices and meanings for global citizenship education at an elite secondary school in Ghana. In this examination, the authors explore the ways in which the school’s interventions to reinforce sameness/unity produce different understandings of global citizenship between students from different social class backgrounds. The article addresses how the school attempts to dissociate students from their native cultures for the purpose of teaching them (...) the ways of knowing and doing necessary to live and work/study in the West. The authors illustrate the ways in which the lessons students are being taught about what it means to be a global citizen reinscribe hegemonic discourse through Pan-African rhetoric. The article concludes by calling for alternative forms of global citizenship education that emphasize critical consciousness. (shrink)

Harms and risks to groups and third-parties can be significant in the context of research, particularly in data-centric studies involving genomic, artificial intelligence, and/or machine learning technologies. This article explores whether and how United States federal regulations should be adapted to better align with current ethical thinking and protect group interests. Three aspects of the Common Rule deserve attention and reconsideration with respect to group interests: institutional review board (IRB) assessment of the risks/benefits of research; disclosure requirements in the informed (...) consent process; and criteria for waivers of informed consent. In accordance with respect for persons and communities, investigators and IRBs should systematically consider potential group harm when designing and reviewing protocols, respectively. Research participants should be informed about any potential group harm in the consent process. We call for additional public discussion, empirical research, and normative analysis on these issues to determine the right regulatory and policy path forward. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Editor's Prologue Rousseau's Philosophy of Transformative, “Denaturing” Education Dewey.

Codes of professional ethics and cases designed to teach ethical decision making are written for individual professionals and ignore the systems level of analysis. They typically employ a lineal view of causality and overvalue placement of blame as a component of ethical problem solving. This article takes a systems approach to ethical problems and identifies aspects of systems that promote or impede ethical decision making. Psychological abuse of children is used as an example of a problem requiring a coordinated, systemic (...) response to ethical issues such as autonomy, privacy, and confidentiality. (shrink)

In the middle section of Theory and Practice, Kant speaks briefly `against Hobbes '; but for a fuller version of Kant's anti-Hobbesianism one must turn to the three Critiques, the Groundwork, and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. It is in those works that one learns that, for Kant, Hobbes 's notion of `will' as fully determined `last appetite' destroys the freedom needed to take `ought' or moral necessity as the motives for self-determined action; that Hobbes ' s version (...) of the social contract is thus incoherent; that Hobbes is not even able to show how moral ideas are conceivable through the `pressure' of `outward objects'. For Kant, in short, Hobbes has no adequate notions of will, freedom, moral necessity, ideation, or even obligatory contract, and therefore fails in his own stated aims. Key Words: Hobbes • Kant • politics • reason • teleology • will. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leibniz’s Political and Moral Philosophy in the Novissima Sinica, 1699–1999Patrick RileyThe Preface to Leibniz’s Novissima Sinica 1 contains an important but highly compressed and abbreviated quintessence of his theory of justice or jurisprudence universelle—a version so compressed and abbreviated that one must have a broader and fuller understanding of this universal jurisprudence before one can entirely appreciate what Leibniz has to say about Christian charity, Platonism, and geometry in (...) the Novissima Sinica itself. Above all, one wants to know why Leibniz, in the key paragraph of the Preface to Novissima Sinica, should describe the Chinese emperor as just and charitable and as a (more or less) “Platonic” geometer who is as wise as he is charitable. And why should Leibniz contrast this “wisely charitable” Chinese ruler with the Pontius Pilate who irresponsibly asked, “What is truth?” and then permitted the judicial murder of the very Christ who did most to make charity and justice coextensive by saying, “A new law I give unto you, that ye love one another”? 2 The wise course, therefore, is to throw enough light on Leibnizian universal jurisprudence in general to make his moral-political utterances in Novissima Sinica intelligible in particular.In 1693, four years before the publication of Novissima Sinica, Leibniz revealed the outlines of his jurisprudence universelle in the Codex Iuris Gentium:a good man is one who loves everybody, so far as reason permits. Justice, then, which is the virtue which regulates that affection which [End Page 217] the Greeks call philanthropy, will be most conveniently defined... as the charity of the wise man, that is, charity which follows the dictates of wisdom... Charity is a universal benevolence, and benevolence the habit of loving or of willing the good. Love then signifies rejoicing in the happiness of another..., the happiness of those whose happiness pleases us turns into our own happiness, since things which please us are desired for their own sakes. 3Slightly later, in La véritable piété, Leibniz indicated what this view of justice entails:those who... reduce justice to [mere] rigor, and who fail altogether to understand that one cannot be just without being benevolent... in a word, not only those who look for their profit, pleasure, and glory in the misery of others, but also those who are not at all anxious to procure the common good and to lift out of misery those who are in their care, and generally those who show themselves to be without enlightenment and without charity, boast in vain of piety which they do not know at all, whatever appearance they create. 4The central idea of Leibniz’s “universal jurisprudence,” which aims to find quasi-geometrical, eternal moral verities equally valid for all rational beings, human or divine, is that justice is “the charity of the wise” (caritas sapientis), 5 that it is not mere conformity to sovereign-ordained “positive” law given ex plenitudo potestatis (in the manner of Hobbes); nor is it mere “refraining from harm” or even “rendering what is due” (the neminem laedere and suum cuique tribuere of Roman law). 6 The equal stress on “charity” and on “wisdom” suggests that Leibniz’s practical thought is a kind of fusing of Platonism—in which the wise know the eternal truths such as absolute goodness (Phaedo 75d), which the gods themselves also know and love (Euthyphro 93-10e) and which therefore deserve to rule (Republic 443d-e) 7 —and of Pauline Christianity, whose key moral idea is that charity or love is the first of the virtues (“though I speak [End Page 218] with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal”). 8 Historically, there is nothing remarkable in trying to fuse Platonism and Christianity. Augustine’s thought (particularly the early De Libero Arbitrio) is just such a fusion. 9 But Leibniz was the last of the great Christian Platonists, and left the world just as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant were about to transform and “secularize” it.I. If one decomposes caritas sapientis into its parts, charity and wisdom, the provenance of both elements is clear enough... (shrink)

The publication of the fifteenth volume of Leibniz’ “General Political and Historical Correspondence,” covering the period January to September 1698, does not revolutionize our view of Leibniz’ practical philosophy. But it does throw valuable light on his moral, political, jurisprudential and religious thought in general, and on two extremely important works in particular: the Novissima Sinica, which Leibniz had published in 1697 and was about to revise and re-publish in 1699, and the Unvorgreiffliches Bedencken, which he began in 1698 with (...) his friend the Lutheran Abbot Gerhard Molanus as part of his irenical project of healing the “schism” between Evangelicals and the Reformed. For Leibniz’ moral-political thought it is the letters concerning these two works—and there are many of them in “Correspondence Vol. 15”—which matter most, even if other letters, to be mentioned briefly at the end of this review, throw further light on additional Leibnizian practical concerns. (shrink)