I think that everyone who has commented in the previous series on Rawls is approaching his work in the wrong way, but since I have written an entire book on the subject I will simply leave it at that.
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
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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Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.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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8 comments:
You can't give us a hint?
s.w.,
As you perhaps recall, Prof. Wolff has written fairly extensively at this blog in the past about his view of Rawls. So even without having read his Understanding Rawls, based on his past comments here I think I have some grasp of his view. If I had to put it in one sentence, that view is that TJ is a failed theorem in bargaining theory. The view is that Rawls originally sought to prove a theorem, then, when he realized (after criticisms of his articles from various people, incl RPW) that the proof didn't really work, he was reluctant to give up the apparatus of the bargaining game -- so he kept that apparatus, which doesn't work, and surrounded it with hundreds of pages of other stuff of no great significance. (I hope that as a summary of RPW's view that is reasonably accurate, albeit doubtless way too abbreviated.)
LFC,
thank you very much...
Although there probably isn't one right way to approach Rawls.
I'm not claiming that every interpretation of Rawls is correct: if you read Rawls as justifying totalitarianism, you're off course.
However, there are lots of perspectives on Rawls.
LFC, Thank you. I could not have said it better myself.
Prof Wolff
You're welcome. (For the record, I feel I must add that this is not a view of Rawls I myself share. But that's not the question s.w. asked; he asked about your view.)
LFC, all the better!
"Prophetic justice" is Cornel West's own term and explained in the introduction to his book Black Prophetic Fire. It is a general term for an activist-oriented non-abstract pursuit of justice, and based on anti-theory approach as conceived by West's mentor, Richard Rorty.
There are many different ways to read Rawls, and there are also many surpressed or unpublished texts of Rawls, some of which has been put into Rawls archive at Harvard library now by his wife. Other work I speculate is in some kind of limbo due to Rawls' 1995 stroke and odd termination of his academic career by having his students and Burton Dreben edit his last work, and his own wish hot to publish much more than his best work as he saw it. The attempt to conceive a more realistic utopia in The Law of Peoples than his earlier procedural republic ideal did not work any better, so his theories of justice as fairness never were worked into a form which would guide future social criticism or policy directions for America or any other democracy. Rawls fully realized the powerlessness of his ideal theory of justice in the end and did not think he had won any argument against the Marxists or other right-wing critics of the West. The meta-philosophy of Rawls, in particular the innovations regarding justification using a more coherentist approach than a deduction from first principles is not "rubbish" or a "fat suit" to distract from the real arguments but an application of Quine, Rorty and Sellars assumptions to theorizing about a just society (anti-foundationalism is a real political philosophy, not a fantasy of Rawls).
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