Gordon Graham

Ethics and International Relations, Second Edition, offers a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical issues raised by international politics. Presupposing no prior philosophical knowledge and deliberately avoiding the use of technical language, it is ideally suited for political philosophy, applied ethics and international relations courses. Revised and updated, new material includes coverage of the war on terror, the impact of globalization, and ideas of cosmopolitan governance. Clearly and thoughtfully organized, it proceeds logically from general morality and international relations to issues surrounding just war theory and global justice A crisp, analytical treatment presented with a student-sensitive approach and informed by real world issues Covers a wide array of subtopics.

Sir William Hamilton was revered in his lifetime by his philosophical contemporaries. The publication of Mill’s Examination of his work in 1865 speedily brought about a very negative assessment, from which Hamilton’s reputation has never recovered. This chapter sets out Hamilton’s philosophical contentions in relation to Reid and Kant, examines Mill’s criticisms and Mansel’s reply to them with a view to establishing a more judicious assessment, somewhere between the extremes of veneration and condemnation. It argues that Hamilton’s conception of philosophy was consonant with the tradition of Scottish common sense philosophy, and that his neglect in part derives from the general decline of that tradition.

This essay is a critical exploration of certain key elements in modernity's self-understanding – pluralism, secularism, the morally neutral state, and the the harm conditoin as a principle of law. Careful examination of all these elements reveals deep confusion about how they are to be understood. The picture that emerges is one in which modern society's self-image diverges dramatically from the reality, and critque of this self-image uncovers a pressing need for a reappraiasal of the values that are commonly thought to underlie the contemporary Western world

For a long time theories of history of the speculative sort have been out of favour. Accounts of the whole sweep of human history, like Hegel's, or even of more limited historical cycles, like Spengler's or Toynbee's, have been found much too grand for the workaday historian and have smacked too much of apriorism for post-positivist philosophy. Consequently, few take them seriously or treat them as more than fanciful aberrations which may serve as useful examples of how not to proceed in history or philosophy

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.

This paper explores developments in the defence of theism within Scottish philosophy following Hume's Dialogues and the advent of Darwinian evolutionary biology. By examining the writings of two nineteenth-century Scottish philosophers, it aims to show that far from Darwinian biology completing Hume's destruction of natural theology, it prompted a new direction for the defence of philosophical theism. Henry Calderwood and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison occupied, respectively, the Chairs of Moral Philosophy and Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in the late nineteenth century. Their books reveal that the challenge of articulating new grounds for philosophical theism was not motivated by a conservative desire to see off a new intellectual threat, but by a desire for a proper understanding of evolutionary biology.