Gordon Graham

This essay is not a further contribution to the debate about liberal individualism, the chief topic of discussion in political and social philosophy for the last twenty-five years or more. Nevertheless it is necessary to begin by rehearsing some features of that debate, claims that will be very familiar to contemporary political philosophers. Inspired largely by John Rawls, the modern version of political liberalism has tried to make coherent a conception of politics according to which political affairs should be separated, or at least seriously distanced, from the various moral and religious loyalties and programmes of individuals and groups of citizens. This central contention of Rawlsian liberalism has been expressed in different ways, but according to one of the commonest versions, it is to be interpreted as the view that the right must take precedence over the good. That is to say, in the political sphere, the implementation and application of impartial rules of social justice and civil liberty must take precedence over competing conceptions of what is or is not a valuable way of spending a human life . Another familiar way of expressing the same doctrine says that the state must be neutral with respect to the moral alternatives with which a modern pluralistic society presents its members. This claim about state neutrality is most easily illustrated by a notable example; whether homosexuality is morally wrong or not is not the business of the legislator, and thus the goodness or badness of a gay lifestyle is a matter on which the law should be neutral

This paper draws on some lines of thought in Kant’s Critique of Judgment to construct an aesthetic counterpart to the moral argument for the existence of God that Kant formulates in the Critique of Practical Reason. The paper offers this aesthetic version as a theistic way of explaining how the natural world can be thought valuable independently of human desires and purposes. It further argues that such an argument must commend itself to anyone who is as deeply committed to the preservation of nature as to the promotion of justice.

Can human history as a whole be interpreted in any meaningful way? Has there been real progress between stone age and space age? Does history repeat itself? Is there evidence of divine providence? Questions such as these have fascinated thinkers, and some of the greatest philosophers, notably Kant and Hegel, have turned their minds to philosophical history. As a branch of philosophy, however, it has received little attention in the analytical tradition. This pioneering work aims to bring the methods of analytical philosophy to the critical examination of some of these questions. In addition to the thought of Hegel and Kant, the discussion ranges over the writings of Augustine, Machiavelli, and Alasdair MacIntyre, providing a readable introduction to the philosophy of history.

Can human history as a whole be interpreted in any meaningful way? Has there been real progress between stone age and space age? Does history repeat itself? Is there evidence of divine providence? Questions such as these have fascinated thinkers, and some of the greatest philosophers, notably Kant and Hegel, have turned their minds to philosophical history. As a branch of philosophy, however, it has received little attention in the analytical tradition. This pioneering work aims to bring the methods of analytical philosophy to the critical examination of some of these questions. The ideas of historical progress, cultural cycles, historical rupture, and God in history are all subjected to careful analysis. Gordon Graham argues that, although unfashionable, the claim that history is the story of progress under the guidance of providence is one of the most plausible accounts of the shape of the past.

1. The appearance of Islam upon the stage of international politics hasbeen greeted by some commentators as a return to the Middle Ages. Preciselywhat they mean by this is not very clear, to themselves no less than their readers perhaps. In part, no doubt, they refer to the kinds of punishment Islamic law requires, which have a brutality associated in the common mind with medieval Europe. In part too there is the feeling that the phenomena of religion in politics, inquisitions, holy wars, government by clergy, are things of the past and that the undesirability of theocracy is a question long since settled