In this article I interpret John Rawls’s concept of the original position as a spiritual exercise. In addition to the standard interpretation of the original position as an expository device to select principles of justice for the fundamental institutions of society, I argue that Rawls also envisages it as a “spiritual exercise”: a voluntary personal practice intended to bring about a transformation of the self. To make this argument, I draw on the work of Pierre Hadot, a philosopher and classicist, (...) who introduced the idea of spiritual exercises as central to ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy. By reading Rawls alongside Hadot, this article portrays Rawls as a thinker deeply concerned with the question of how subjects can lead more just and fulfilling lives. It also proposes that the original position as a spiritual exercise can help defend liberalism as a social and political doctrine. (shrink)

The paper discusses the meta-philosophy of thought-experiments, in particular its neglected diachronic aspect, focusing on Putnam’s work as the paradigm case, and on the trail that developed out of the Twin Earth thought-experiment. Putnam's experiment is discussed from a perspective that combines metaphilosophy and actual history of analytic philosophy. Peter Unger has branded the whole debate around it as empty and fruitless. A meta- philosophical analysis shows him to be wrong. The experiment as originally proposed already appeals to a broad (...) variation of examples and intuitive induction; the variation continues in other works addressing the issue, and produces interesting results. The second aspect is the search for reflective equilibrium, lasting till the present day. The internal logic of these processes is discussed, in order to show that the accusation for emptiness turns against Unger himself. In general, debates around thought-experiments, the already famous and also around new ones, make a large part of contemporary analytic philosophy. The way to understand a large part of this, and of debates surrounding it, is to link it to the internal understanding of a typical thought-experiment; stages of a particular experiment get discussed, developed and changed in the history of a particular trail produced by it. This is an important way in which a philosophical tradition is born, and we need to combine synchronic and diachronic approaches in order to understand it. (shrink)

justice as fairness envisions a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights cooperating within an egalitarian economic system. His account of political liberalism addresses the legitimate use of political power in a democracy, aiming to show how enduring unity may be achieved despite the diversity of worldviews that free institutions allow. His writings on the law of peoples extend these theories to liberal foreign policy, with the goal of imagining how a peaceful and tolerant international order might be possible.