ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was a renowned American philosopher who first came to be widely known through his 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974),[1] which won the National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion in 1975. Pressing further the anti-consequentialist aspects of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Nozick argued that respect for individual rights is the key standard …
In 1974 libertarian ideas had virtually no presence within the academic establishment. Free-market economists F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman had not yet won their Nobel prizes (Hayek’s would come later that year and Friedman’s two years after that), and the reigning political philosopher was Nozick’s own colleague John Rawls, whose monumental treatise, A Theory of …
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) is typical, though quite wrongly, considered a coarse social Darwinist. After all, Spencer, and not Darwin, coined the infamous expression “survival of the fittest”, leading G. E. Moore to conclude erroneously in Principia Ethica (1903) that Spencer committed the naturalistic fallacy. According to Moore, Spencer’s practical reasoning was deeply flawed insofar as he purportedly …
Despite his egoism and individualism, Spencer held that life in the community was important. Because the relation of parts to one another was one of mutual dependency, and because of the priority of the individual ‘part’ to the collective, society could not do or be anything other than the sum of its units. This view …
In much the same way that Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made significant contributions to a wide variety of areas, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political theory. His …
Since Man has mastered speech, the meta question has been asked: what is philosophy, in general, and political philosophy, in particular? The question of its function follows. Ancient and modern philosophers have devoted a substantial part of their life to an attempt to answer the meta question. Their theoretical framework, i.e. their approaches, have diverged widely. How …
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) profoundly influenced the shape of nineteenth-century British thought and political discourse. His substantial corpus of works includes texts in logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs. Among his most well-known and significant is A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, Three Essays on …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, was the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. In this work, Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts …
Starting in the 1600s, European philosophers began debating the question of who should govern a nation. As the absolute rule of kings weakened, Enlightenment philosophers argued for different forms of democracy. In 1649, a civil war broke out over who would rule England—Parliament or King Charles I. The war ended with the beheading of the …
In political theory, Hume has both theoretical discussions on the origins of government and more informal essays on popular political controversies of his day. In his theoretical discussions, he attacks two basic notions in eighteenth-century political philosophy: the social contract and the instinctive nature of justice regarding private property. In his 1748 essay “Of the Original …