There is a story about a distinguished mathematician who had been invited to deliver a course of advanced lectures to other high-powered students of mathematics on a subject about which he was known to have some original ideas. The course, however, got off to a slow start. He devoted three lectures to discussing whether a certain proposition P was or was not self evident. The proposition P was essential to the argument he wanted to develop. Happily, he was able to (...) announce at the opening of his fourth lecture that he had decided that P was self evident. There was an audible sigh of relief. It was now known, on the highest authority, that P was self evident. From that the argument proceeded briskly and with irresistible logic to the lecturer's surprising and devastating conclusions. (shrink)

The monumental Florilegium Coislinianum can be dated in the 9th-10th century and originally contained all the letters up to Omega, but now the most complete manuscript, Parisinus gr. 923 , ends at Psi. Hitherto only the third book has been made available in a critical edition, while the rest of the anthology is still not accessible in a printed version. This article presents the critical edition of the second book , containing some interesting fragments attributed e.g. to a certain Leontius (...) the Damascene, to Athanasius of Alexandria and to John Chrysostom. (shrink)

In the summer of 1953 a lecture-course organized by the British Council was given at Peterhouse, Cambridge. The Faculty of Moral Science were responsible for the programme of lectures and discussions, and Miss Margaret Master man and Dr. Theodore Red path were appointed by the Faculty as joint directors. The lectures must have been well received by the teachers of philosophy who attended and participated in the discussions— representatives from the Continent, the United States and even China were on hand; (...) and the suggestion arose quite naturally that they be published in a single volume. However, some of the lecturers wished to redraft the papers they had read and hence the essays now presented, under the editorship of C. A. Mace, in the volume British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, A Cambridge Symposium are in a number of instances dressed up and greatly expanded versions of the lectures actually given. Further, it is worth noting that the essay by G. E. Moore was written specifically for this volume and is based on a discussion held with some students who attended the sessions at Peterhouse. Thus it is that the papers now published vary greatly in length from the welcome ten pages contributed by G. E. Moore to the seventy-nine pages from Miss Master man. This disparity is, of course, an anomaly in a volume explicitly designed to reflect trends in very recent British philosophy and to convey, to those relatively unfamiliar with it, some reliable picture of its condition at mid-century. But this volume records a present-day Cambridge symposium and as such it must in some measure reflect quite local interests and conditions. However, most of the contributors are very well known and the essays now presented to the public contain a good deal that will interest and profit the reader. (shrink)

In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, peopleâes material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality. In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawlsâes theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state (...) but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making. Cohen also charges Rawlsâes constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality. (shrink)

Some ways of defending inequality against the charge that it is unjust require premises that egalitarians find easy to dismiss—statements, for example, about the contrasting deserts and/or entitlements of unequally placed people. But a defense of inequality suggested by John Rawls and elaborated by Brian Barry has often proved irresistible even to people of egalitarian outlook. The persuasive power of this defense of inequality has helped to drive authentic egalitarianism, of an old-fashioned, uncompromising kind, out of contemporary political philosophy. The (...) present essay is part of an attempt to bring it back in. (shrink)

1. The present paper is a continuation of my “Self-Ownership, World Ownership, and Equality,” which began with a description of the political philosophy of Robert Nozick. I contended in that essay that the foundational claim of Nozick's philosophy is the thesis of self-ownership, which says that each person is the morally rightful owner of his own person and powers, and, consequently, that each is free to use those powers as he wishes, provided that he does not deploy them aggressively against (...) others. To be sure, he may not harm others, and he may, if necessary, be forced not to harm them, but he should never be forced to help them, as people are in fact forced to help others, according to Nozick, by redistributive taxation. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen was one of the most gifted, influential, and progressive voices in contemporary political philosophy. At the time of his death in 2009, he had plans to bring together a number of his most significant papers. This is the first of three volumes to realize those plans. Drawing on three decades of work, it contains previously uncollected articles that have shaped many of the central debates in political philosophy, as well as papers published here for the first time. (...) In these pieces, Cohen asks what egalitarians have most reason to equalize, he considers the relationship between freedom and property, and he reflects upon ideal theory and political practice. Included here are classic essays such as "Equality of What?" and "Capitalism, Freedom, and the Proletariat," along with more recent contributions such as "Fairness and Legitimacy in Justice," "Freedom and Money," and the previously unpublished "How to Do Political Philosophy." On ample display throughout are the clarity, rigor, conviction, and wit for which Cohen was renowned. Together, these essays demonstrate how his work provides a powerful account of liberty and equality to the left of Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Isaiah Berlin. (shrink)

This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a series of sophisticated (...) engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. In the case of Rawlsian doctrine, Cohen looks to people's lives in general. He argues that egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been. (shrink)

‘No matter what the grievance, and I'm sure that the Palestinians have some legitimate grievances, nothing can justify the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. If they were attacking our soldiers it would be a different matter.’ (Dr. Zvi Shtauber, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 4, May 1, 2003).

First published in 1978, this book rapidly established itself as a classicof modern Marxism.

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In his Tanner Lecture of 1979 called ‘Equality of What?’ Amartya Sen asked what metric egalitarians should use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society. What aspect of a person’s condition should count in a fundamental way for egalitarians, and not merely as cause of or evidence of or proxy for what they regard as fundamental?

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII Coda Appendix Acknowledgements.

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the (...) term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us. (shrink)