It’s been a week since we had a new post here, and I vaguely remember making some gesture toward an intention to help keep up regular posts while Irfan is off taking pictures in Palestine and Israel. Since I currently find myself bereft of thoughts that are sufficiently interesting and complex for a blog post that would not take me hours to compose, I’ll resort to my usual strategy for moments like these: self-promotion.

As of July 31st*, you will be able to purchase my book, Aristotle on Political Community, published by Cambridge University Press and guaranteed to be the single best monograph on Aristotle’s political philosophy published on the final day of July this year. Well, I suppose you already can buy it, since it is available for pre-order, but let’s not worry about those kinds of details. None of you will buy it anyway, because like so many academic books these days it is outrageously overpriced. But perhaps you’ll be able to check it out from your library, should you find yourself with a library that purchases such books or makes them available via interlibrary loan. In any event, I do hope that some of the four or five readers of this blog who are not regular contributors will manage to read it. I’ve been trying to write books for over twenty years and I finally managed it, so it’d be a shame if the only people who read it are people who get free copies in order to review it.

One virtue of the book is its handsome cover:

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In this post I take a break from my series on the Circumstances of Justice to abuse Irfan’s trust and hospitality in order to promote a web project of my own: Free Range Philosophers. From the site description:

Free Range Philosophers presents interviews of people with advanced training in philosophy who are either working outside of traditional academic jobs or engaged in philosophical outreach or other philosophical activities outside of the academic classroom. … In addition to serving as a resource for graduate students and PhDs who are exploring other career options, the hope is that these interviews will help philosophers inside and outside the academy expand our conception of what philosophy is and what it can be.

My first two interviews are with a philosopher who left a tenure-track position in order to better pursue his conception of what philosophy should be and with a philosopher-designer who found a nonfaculty position that allows her to combine both of her passions. Enjoy!

This is Part 3 of a four (or five) part series based on a conference-length version of a longer paper I’m currently preparing for submission to academic journals. Part 1 is just a brief introduction to the paper, but it has generated a deep and ongoing conversation about the nature of justice which is well worth reading (and joining). Part 2 is primarily exegetical, presenting and interpreting the key passages from Rawls and Hume on the “circumstances of justice.” But it too has generated a much deeper discussion of the nature of justice. You can also consult the full paper at any time.

In this section, I focus on showing how the internal consistency of Hume’s account does not survive Rawls’s attempted appropriation of that account. This is another short section, and I suspect the discussion will mostly pick up on some of the same issues that have already been raised with respect to Part 2.

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This is Part 2 of a four (or five) part series based on a conference-length version of a longer paper I’m currently preparing for submission to academic journals. Part 1 is just a brief introduction to the paper, but it has generated a deep and ongoing conversation about the nature of justice which is well worth reading (and joining). You can also consult the full paper at any time.

This section of the paper is more substantial, but it is also primarily exegetical. I’m certainly interested in hearing critiques or additions to my interpretations of Rawls and Hume. But we can also continue some of the deeper discussion about justice if some readers would like to critique substantive elements of Hume and/or Rawls as interpreted. Another question that might be worth exploring in light of our discussion of Part 1: how similar or different is this account of the circumstances of justice from the account(s) we find in Plato’s Republic?

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