Reclaiming the history of ethics

About this book

The essays in this volume offer an approach to the history of moral and political philosophy that takes its inspiration from John Rawls. All the contributors are philosophers who have studied with Rawls and they offer this collection in his honor. The distinctive feature of this approach is to address substantive normative questions in moral and political philosophy through an analysis of the texts and theories of major figures in the history of the subject: Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Marx. By reconstructing the core of these theories in a way that is informed by contemporary theoretical and practical concerns, the contributors show how the history of the subject is a resource for understanding present and perennial problems in moral and political philosophy. This collection will be of particular interest to moral and political philosophers, political theorists, historians of philosophy, and historians of ideas.