Reviews for The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (v. 2)

The average rating for The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (v. 2) based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-28 00:00:00 Mark Vander-starre Sometimes I wish I could give half-stars. Some of the essays in this book are really phenomenal, but I reserve 5-star ratings for books that are really influential for my thinking or that I consider important reads that I recommend for everyone. This is certainly for a specialty audience, but it was more accessible than I expected, and the issues examined were substantive and well-treated. The intended audience seems to be analytic philosophers who are unfamiliar with Hegel's thought, and no familiarity with Hegelian-influenced analytic thinkers (like Sellars, Brandom, or McDowell) is presupposed. In fact, though these thinkers are discussed occasionally, there seems to be a concerted effort to engage thinkers typically hostile to (or at least ignoring of) Hegel's thought. But I would also really encourage aspiring Hegel scholars to read this anthology, as a model for how to communicate Hegelian themes to an uninitiated (and possibly antagonistic) audience. It might just reduce the antipathy directed the other way, that is, the (probably defensive) scorn that many Hegelians exhibit toward conceptual analysis and anti-idealist metaphysics.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-03 00:00:00 Daniel Stafiej This is a patchy book, which could have benefited from more vigorous editing. Some of the continental sympathies of some of the writers, though a welcome addition to analytic interpretations of Hegel, could have been better expressed if cut down to significantly smaller, and less convoluted, segments. The best essays in this book are those by Kolb, Pinkard, and Dulckeit; while the worst essays are those by Nuzzo, Margolis, and Westphal; the other contributions are really just gestures towards possible interpretative tacks one may take to Hegel, but don't really lend much credence to any of them.