Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne

by Daniel A. Dombrowski

Overview

Daniel A. Dombrowski brings together the thought of the 20th-century philosophy’s greatest political liberal, John Rawls, with the thought of the great process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. He shows that political liberalism is intimately linked with process philosophy, renaming it ‘process liberalism’. He justifies this process liberalism in contrast to four potentially troublesome sources or influences: metaphysics, religion, right-wing politics and left-wing politics. Dombrowski engages a series of interlocutors and alternative positions including Franklin I. Gamwell, Timothy D. Snyder, Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx. In conclusion, he offers a compelling, intricate and resourceful argument for nonhuman animal rights based on Rawlsian principles, which in turn forms the basis of a future environmental ethics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474453417
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of 18 books and over a hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics and literature. His books include Whitehead’s Religious Thought: From Mechanism to Organism, From Force to Persuasion (SUNY, 2017), A History of the Concept of God: A Process Approach (SUNY, 2016), Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy (Penn State UniversityPress, 2011), Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006).

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Reflective Equilibrium as a Process

2. Political Liberalism and Process Thought

3. Gamwell on ‘The Comprehensive Question’: A Rawlsian Critique

4: Religion, Solitude-in-Solidarity, and the Bloodlands

5. Heidegger, Political Philosophy, and Disequilibrium

6. Organic Marxism and Process Liberalism

7. From Nonhuman Animals to the Environment

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

George Washington University Derek Malone-France

The contemporary movement that traces its origins to Whitehead and Hartshorne is at a critical juncture. Some would align process thought with anti-liberal political philosophies that are starkly at odds with the basic commitments expressed by Whitehead and Hartshorne themselves. Dombrowski is a leading process thinker whose resistance against this anti-liberal shift should give pause to those who have abandoned liberalism in this ominous time of testing, in which pluralistic democracy is being challenged around the globe.

Editorial Reviews

The contemporary movement that traces its origins to Whitehead and Hartshorne is at a critical juncture. Some would align process thought with anti-liberal political philosophies that are starkly at odds with the basic commitments expressed by Whitehead and Hartshorne themselves. Dombrowski is a leading process thinker whose resistance against this anti-liberal shift should give pause to those who have abandoned liberalism in this ominous time of testing, in which pluralistic democracy is being challenged around the globe.

George Washington University Derek Malone-France