Justice for Hedgehogs - Hardcover

Dworkin, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674046714 ISBN 13: 9780674046719

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2011

Synopsis

The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms - philosophical, cynical, or post-modern - threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics - reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being - and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.

About this title

Product Description

DWORKIN, R. JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS[HARDBACK]. CAMBRIDGE, MA, 2011, xi 506 p.,. Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.

Review

"The first thing to strike you about this remarkable book is its ambition...In Justice for Hedgehogs all of Dworkin's great talent is on display, the themes overwhelming in their sheer bigness...The easy material is handled in a way that adds depth, while the complex ideas are communicated so deftly you forget that in the hands of a less elegant writer (or more confused mind) they would be incomprehensible." --New Humanist, March/April 2011, Conor Gearty

"The first thing to be said about this remarkable book is that it has nothing to do with animal rights...Justice for Hedgehogs is not a work of vapid generalisation. It is full of sustained argument and arresting observations drawn from a lifetime of thought and a great armoury of knowledge...Dworkin makes a formidable case for his two rules, presented with insight, wit and forensic elegance." --Spectator, 19 March 2011, Jonathan Sumption

"Dworkin is a very impressive writer, with what his early prey, H.L.A. Hart, is said to have described as a `fluent and somewhat elusive analytical style'. He has a keen lawyerly eye for the way to present a case, and is indefatigable in doing so. He knows a great deal, and deploys what he knows with admirable skill. His works are proper objects of wonder."
--Times Higher Education, 27 January 2011, Simon Blackburn

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0674046714
• ISBN 13: 9780674046719
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 506