Reconstructing Public Reason / / Eric A. MacGilvray.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: MacGilvray, Eric A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2004]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (266 p.)

Can a liberal polity act on pressing matters of public concern in a way that respects the variety of beliefs and commitments that its citizens hold? Recent efforts to answer this question typically begin by seeking an uncontroversial starting point from which legitimate public ends can be said to follow. This reluctance to admit controversial beliefs as legitimate grounds for public action threatens to prevent us from responding effectively to many of the leading social and political challenges that we face. Eric MacGilvray argues that we should shift our attention away from the problem of identifying uncontroversial public ends in the present and toward the problem of evaluating potentially controversial public ends through collective inquiry over time. Rather than ask ourselves which public ends are justified, we must instead decide which public ends we should seek to justify. Reconstructing Public Reason offers a fundamental rethinking of the nature and aims of liberal toleration, and of the political implications of pragmatic philosophy. It also provides fresh interpretations of founding pragmatic thinkers such as John Dewey and William James, and of leading contemporary figures such as John Rawls and Richard Rorty.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Task before Us -- I. TOWARD A PRAGMATIC THEORY OF POLITICAL JUSTIFICATION -- 1 The Tyranny of Minimalism -- 2 Prospectivism and “The Will to Believe” -- 3 Narrative and Moral Reasoning -- II PRAGMATISM AND DEMOCRACY -- 4 Against a Second Pragmatic Acquiescence -- 5 Against Deweyan Democracy -- III POLI TICAL LIBERALISM -- 6 Political Liberalism and the Limits of the Political -- 7 Public Reason and Public Institutions -- 8 The Fact of Reasonable Pluralism -- Conclusion: Liberalism after Minimalism -- Index