Author name: Editor

I Katrina Forrester’s book is an engaging history of John Rawls’s intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls’s theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls’s […]

Uwe Steinhoff is an excellent philosopher. He is analytically exacting, wide ranging, and steeped in many of the central debates. He is also an important critic of the dominant strains of discussion within just war theory. Unfortunately, the book does not live up to Steinhoff’s promise as a theorist. Although there are some insightful interventions in

Raymond Tallis is hungry to expand human consciousness through art. Past and Future In what follows, I shall focus less on what art has been or has meant in the past than on what it might be or might mean in the future. Of course my vision of the future of art is informed and

To introduce our art issue, Anja Steinbauer describes the troubled relationship between art and theory. We might imagine aesthetics, the study of art and beauty, and philosophy as two unhappy partners in a failing relationship, coming to us seeking counselling. “You can’t give me anything”, aesthetics might complain, “you don’t help people appreciate art or

So how do you apply philosophical principles to think about art? An example can be derived from an unlikely source. Reneh Karamians uses Heidegger’s philosophy as an illustration of how to understand aesthetic experience. Martin Heidegger gave philosophy a new description of humanity. No longer was mankind defined in terms of mind distinct from the

Dustin Gray finds out that continuing to exist isn’t as simple as you might think. What does it mean for an object to persist through time? Consider the statement, ‘My car is filthy, I need to wash it.’ Consider the response, ‘How did it get that way?’ The answer is that dirt, dust and other

Peter Caws considers how much is lost in translation. There’s a story about an American evangelist who was challenged about something in his preaching that didn’t agree with the Greek of the New Testament. He is supposed to have replied “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.” Very funny,

Patrick Cox tells us why Zen has to use words to get beyond words. In Zen Buddhism, one often finds ‘explanation’ spoken about in a negative manner. But in writing on Zen, one necessarily explains; explaining something is often the only purpose of an article or book. Can Zen and explanation be reconciled? What about

Ian James Kidd introduces an iconic iconoclast of the philosophy of science. Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was not a conventional philosopher – a fact he delighted in and took great care to maintain. He trained as an opera singer and a physicist, and only came to philosophy by accident, as he freely admitted. He disliked academia

Harvard philosopher Tu Wei-ming is the most famous advocate of the Confucian tradition outside China. Anja Steinbauer talked to him in Boston. Professor Tu, could you give our readers an idea of where your philosophical interests lie? When I first came to the States to study philosophy in 1962, to my great surprise, at the