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10Political judgment: an introductionPolity Press. 2018.Introduction -- What is political judgment? -- Foundations: Plato and Aristotle -- The Kantian Problematic -- The Arendtian Theory of Judgment -- Hermeneutics, tacit knowledge and neo-rationalism.
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4Rationalism in politicsCambridge University Press. 2022.Politics is, at its core, a kind of activity, a particular type of doing. It comprises a distinctive and varied repertoire of human practices that we regularly characterize as political and that we think of as somehow defining the essence of public life. One might say that specific forms of political engagement are to politics as batting, throwing, catching and running are to baseball. They constitute, in effect, the sum and substance of the enterprise.
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15Eumenides and the Invention of PoliticsPolis 39 (1): 77-98. 2022.Recent scholarship has shown that the Eumenides of Aeschylus, far from presenting a complete and coherent picture of the well-ordered polis, in fact offers something quite different, namely, a complex set of questions, concerns and conundrums regarding the very nature of political society. But I suggest that the literature has not yet provided a fully satisfying account of the ways in which those questions are underwritten by the specifically literary practice of Aeschylus as it develops the pla…Read more
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52. The State as a Universe of DiscourseIn Robert Schuett & Peter M. R. Stirk (eds.), The Concept of the State in International Relations: Philosophy, Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 48-80. 2015.
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29Political action and the philosophy of mindContemporary Political Theory 20 (2): 364-384. 2021.The problem of political action has its roots, arguably, in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle seeks to describe an intellectual virtue – phronêsis – that is different from the faculty of theoretical reason but that is nonetheless capable of producing genuinely objective, rational knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what is true. The problem, specifically, is to understand how such a thing is possible, and much of the recent literature appears to suggest that perhaps it’s not. S…Read more
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42Readings in Classical Political Thought (edited book)Hackett Publishing Company. 2000.Designed to include all of the texts from Presocratics through Machiavelli likely to be read in an undergraduate course on classical political thought, this anthology has at its core generous selections from Plato and Aristotle. Building on this core is a sufficiently diverse and substantial selection of texts from other writers--including Thucydides and the Sophists--to allow for inquiry into the variety of Classical Greek approaches to politics, as well as into Roman, Medieval and Renaissance …Read more
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8Books in review : Social ends and political means ediTed by Ted Honderich. London: Routledge & kegan Paul, 1976. Pp. XI, 1977. $16.50 (review)Political Theory 5 (4): 550-553. 1977.
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7The Politics of Objectivity: An Essay on the Foundations of Political ConflictCambridge University Press. 2015.Modern political conflict characteristically reflects and represents deep-seated but also unacknowledged and un-analyzed disagreements about what it means to be 'objective'. In defending this proposition, Peter J. Steinberger seeks to reaffirm the idea of rationalism in politics by examining important problems of public life explicitly in the light of established philosophical doctrine. The Politics of Objectivity invokes, thereby, an age-old, though now widely ignored, tradition of western thou…Read more
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12Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God (review)Review of Metaphysics 60 (4): 890-892. 2007.
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25The Problem with God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be WrongColumbia University Press. 2013.Whether people praise, worship, criticize, or reject God, they all presuppose at least a rough notion of what it means to talk about God. Turning the certainty of this assumption on its head, Steinberger shows that when we are talking about God, we are in fact talking about nothing at all -- there is literally no such idea -- and so all of the arugments we hear from atheists, true believers, and agnostics are and will always be self-defeating.
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9The Concept of Political JudgmentUniversity of Chicago Press. 1993.What is good political judgment? Is it a science subject to strict standards of logic and inference, or is it more like an art, the product of intuition, feeling, or even chance? Peter J. Steinberger shows how the seemingly contradictory claims of inference and intuition are reconciled in the concept of political judgment. Resting his argument on the larger notion of judgment itself, Steinberger develops an original model of how political judgments are made and how we justify calling some of the…Read more
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17The Idea of the StateCambridge University Press. 2005.For a half-century or more, political theory has been characterized by a pronounced distrust of metaphysical or ontological speculation. Such a disposition has been sharply at odds with influential currents in post-war philosophy - both analytic and continental - where metaphysical issues have become a central preoccupation. The Idea of the State seeks to reaffirm the importance of systematic philosophical inquiry into the foundations of political life, and to show how such an approach can cast …Read more
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Reed CollegeRegular Faculty
Portland, Oregon, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |