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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Wednesday, July 15, 2015

A SMALL POINT

I will have more to say about Rawls later on today, but let me now pose one small question to those who seem not to grasp that Rawls was trying to prove a theorem:  Why do you suppose he assumed that the participants in the Original Position are not envious?   I can answer that question very easily.  He needs that assumption becaue otherwise rationally self-interested bargainers will not agree unanimously to a partial ordering of social states -- a familiar mathematical notion from Economics, associated with the name of Vilfredo Pareto, which Rawls needs.  But if you think he is just engaged in a sophisticated channeling of the zeitgeist of the age, then why would he gratuitously assume something so obviously contrary to the simplest facts of human motivation?

Think about it.  Don't just quote one of the ten million things Rawls said about his theory.  Think about it.

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