Top 9 of 2009

People are beginning to put together those inevitable “Best of 2009…” lists, so I thought I would jump on board the reflective December mood. Here are my Top 9 reads of 2009: the books and articles that had the greatest impact on my thinking this year.
          1.   Myles Burnyeat, ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic‘, Harvard [...]

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What Christian Ethics and Justice Will Never Be

What justifies a conception of justice is not its being true to an order antecedent and given to us, but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us.
– John [...]

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John Rawls the Theologian?!

All his life, John Rawls was interested in the question whether and to what extent human life is redeemable – whether it is possible for human beings, individually and collectively, to live so that their lives are worth living…So long as we are justifiably confident that a self-sustaining and just collective life among human beings [...]

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How Public Ought Apologetics Be?

Justification is addressed to those who disagree with us, and therefore it must always proceed from some consensus, from premises we and others publicly recognize as true.” – John Rawls, ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical’ (1985)
When procrastinating philosophy students compile their lists of the best philosophers of the Twentieth-Century John Rawls is often one [...]

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