Review Article: The Modest Professor

John Rawls ( 2007) Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. All parenthetical citations in this essay refer to this volume.

Rawls (2000) Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Steven B. Smith ( 2007) ‘The Philosopher of Our Times’, The New York Sun (11 May), URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/54265 .

Rawls’s lectures on his own theory are not included in the recent volume of his political philosophy lectures, having been already published: see Rawls (2001). Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly. Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press .

A version of these remarks is included in Rawls ( 2000) ‘Burton Dreben: A Reminiscence’, Future Pasts: Perspectives on the Place of the Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh. New York: Oxford University Press. The relevant passages from this published version are reprinted in Barbara Herman’s editor’s foreword to Rawls (n. 1), pp. xvi-xviii.

In John Stuart Mill ( 1969) Collected Works, vol. 10, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson , p. 52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rawls also cites this quote from Mill in the introduction to his lectures on Locke, p. 105.

R.G. Colllingwood ( 1939) An Autobiography, p. 62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Michael P. Zuckert (2002) ‘John Rawls, Historian’, Claremont Review of Books 2(4), URL: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.783/article_detail.asp.

Ibid.

Rawls (1993/ 1996) Political Liberalism, revised paperback edn, p. 376. New York: Columbia University Press.

Smith (n. 3).

Kerstin Budde has argued that, in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Rawls misinterprets Kant for roughly these reasons. ‘Rawls’s interpretation of Kant’, Budde argues, is ‘crucially determined by his own theoretical position which cannot accept certain key features of Kant’s position, and as a consequence Rawls interprets Kant in a way that incorporates his own presuppositions, but changes Kant’s theory in vital respects, up to the very nature of how to perceive and justify normative principles’. Budde (2007) ‘Rawls on Kant: Is Rawls a Kantian or Kant a Rawlsian?’, European Journal of Political Theory 6(3): 339-58, p. 354.

J.B. Schneewind (2007) ‘ John Rawls, Samuel Freeman (ed.), Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy’, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Posted 13 Oct.., URL: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=11423.

For my own argument against this view, see Michael L. Frazer (2007) ‘John Rawls: Between Two Enlightenments’, Political Theory 35(6): 756-80.