Search results for ""author douglas b rasmussen""

Contemporary political philosophy e.g. Martha Nussbaum, John Rawls and Amartya Sen tries to separate itself from other philosophical positions and frameworks. Now, Den Uyl and Rasmussen challenge this trend by moving away liberalism to what they call `individualistic perfectionism , creating a powerful new way to think about ethics.

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Liberalism is today under serious intellectual attack. It is said to undermine its own principles, to have lost any strong claims to universal validity, and to foster injustice and inhumanity. Liberalism is associated with Enlightenment thought and is considered by some as an outmoded political philosophy. Professors Rasmussen and Den Uyl take up this challenge to liberalism. They show that liberalism is not locked into traditional ways of understanding itself and has the capacity to enrich itself by intellectual traditions not usually associated with liberalism.Unlike much of liberalism, which defends its politics by resorting to either moral skepticism or moral minimalism, Rasmussen and Den Uyl employ a distinction between normative and “metanormative” principles. The latter are more directly tied to politics and concern principles that establish social/political conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. Thus it is not necessary to minimize the moral universe to support liberalism. Rasmussen and Den Uyl support their distinction through a novel use of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, and they show the importance of this distinction when they specifically address the positions of two leading critics of liberalism - John Gray and Alasdair MacIntyre.

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"An excellent book that provides a systematic account of Rand's work as a philosopher.... The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand gathers contributions from professional philosophers (some of them quite renowned) to tackle the various components --- metaphysical/epistemological, ethical, and social/political --- of Rand's comprehensive system. All the contributors demonstrate the particular genius of current academic philosophy: the painstaking and meticulous analysis of assumptions with an eye toward the coherence and consistency of the conclusions derived therefrom.... Thorough and judicious, this book will provide the reader with the intellectual leverage necessary to understand an often confusing, always controversial, occasionally original, and perhaps curiously contemporary writer and thinker." -- Lloyd Lewis, Modern Fiction Studies

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