Bart Schultz

Although no one can deny the profound importance of John Rawls's work in political philosophy, which covered both an original theory of justice and extensive work and teaching on the history of moral and political philosophy, we are now at the point where his contributions more clearly suggest certain historical limitations. Such topics as gender justice, racial justice, and environmental justice figured in Rawls's work only belatedly and in less than satisfactory ways. Surely the wide influence of the Rawlsian revolution should suggest that the erasures and blindspots in his historical reconstructions ought to be acknowledged and addressed, rather than avoided out of some misguided conception of charity in interpretation. Key Words: exemplars • feminism • gender • Justice As Fairness • Kantianism • critical race theory • social contract • Straussianism • utilitarianism.

This essay is in effect something of a self-review of my book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe and of the volume, co-edited with Georgios Varouxakis, Utilitarianism and Empire . My chief concern here is to go beyond those earlier works in underscoring the arbitrariness of the dominant contextualist and reconstructive historical accounts of J. S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick on the subjects of race and racism. The forms of racism are many, and simple historical accuracy suggests that both Mill and Sidgwick could be described as ‘racist’ on some plausible understandings of that term

Henry Sidgwick was one of the great intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Britain. He was first and foremost a great moral philosopher, whose masterwork The Methods of Ethics is still widely studied today. He also wrote on economics, politics, education and literature. He was deeply involved in the founding of the first college for women at the University of Cambridge. He was also much concerned with the sexual politics of his close friend John Addington Symonds, a pioneer of gay studies. Through his famous student, G. E. Moore, a direct line can be traced from Sidgwick and his circle to the Bloomsbury group. Bart Schultz has written a magisterial overview of this great Victorian sage. This biography will be eagerly sought out by readers interested in philosophy, Victorian literary studies, the history of ideas, the history of psychology and gender and gay studies.

In early work, I argued that Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, often represented, in his political speeches and writings, a form of philosophical pragmatism with special relations to the University of Chicago and its reform tradition. That form of pragmatism, especially evident in the work of such early figures as John Dewey and Jane Addams, and such later figures as Saul Alinsky, Abner Mikva, David Greenstone, Richard Rorty, Danielle Allen, and Cass Sunstein, contributed greatly to the intellectual atmosphere that Obama breathed during his many years in Chicago as a community organizer, senior lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School, and emerging figure in Illinois politics. And that form of pragmatism has, from Dewey to Obama, been keenly concerned to appropriate for its purposes the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. My purpose in this essay is to set out these filiations in ways more accessible to a global audience, and to carry the story forward through the opening moves of the Obama presidency. Key Words: Obama • pragmatism • optimism • pessimism • community • rhetoric • political philosophy.

Henry Sidgwick has gone down in the history of philosophy as both the great, classical utilitarian moral theorist who authoredThe Methods of Ethics, and an outstanding exemplar of intellectual honesty and integrity, one whose personal virtues were inseparable from his philosophical strengths and method. Yet this construction of Sidgwick the philosopher has been based on a too limited understanding of Sidgwick's casuistry and leading practical ethical concerns. As his friendship with John Addington Symonds reveals, Sidgwick was deeply entangled in an effort to negotiate the proper spheres of the public and private, not only in philosophical and religious matters, but also with respect to explosive questions of sexuality – particularly same sex actions and identities, as celebrated by Symonds and other champions of Oxford Hellenism and Whitmania. His willingness to mislead the public about such issues suggests that Sidgwick's utilitarian casuistry was rather more complex and esoteric than has been recognized.

The career of Oxford philosopher Roger Crisp has produced a wonderfully rich yield of elegant, lucid philosophizing that combines in a rare mix historical erudition and brilliant, creative, and highly interdisciplinary ethical argument. Crisp is steeped in Aristotle and Mill, W. D. Ross and Derek Parfit, but his deepest source of inspiration is by his own admission the Victorian era Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, author of the famous Methods of Ethics. Although Sidgwick has been regarded as a kind of master of those who know by everyone from Brand Blanshard and C. D. Broad to John Rawls and Peter Singer, his star has been on an especially dramatic ascent in recent decades, in very...

A recent spate of books on the life and legacy of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, notably Steven B. Smith's Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, and Judaism , suggests a desperate effort to salvage Strauss and the Straussian school of political philosophy from the wreckage of American neoconservatism. Although a number of these works are quite thoughtful and helpfully counter many of the more extreme (and uglier) charges made concerning the meaning of Straussianism and its political influence, their general drift in fact confirms what the more responsible critics of this school have long maintained about its tendency to oppose positions that would help advance meaningful social change and social justice. Key Words: Leo Strauss • Straussianism • Platonism • esoteric writing • zeteti-cism • Socratic • skepticism • relativism • fideism.