"The Faith of a Heretic" by Kaufman Walter

Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 Freiburg, Germany - September 4, 1980 Princeton, New Jersey) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet.

A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature.

He served for over 30 years as a Professor at Princeton University.

He is particularly renowned as a scholar and translator of Nietzsche.

He also wrote one of the best books on Hegel.

Kaufmann's lucid English helped make accessible to an English-speaking readership the dense language and thought of many of the theologians and philosophers whom he discussed. Kaufmann also published a translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I.

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Read online : http://www.archive.org/details/faithofaheretic012669mbp

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Kaufmann was brought up in the Lutheran faith.
At age 11, finding that he believed neither in the Trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus, he converted to Judaism.
The rise of Nazism did not deter him.
Kaufmann subsequently discovered that his grandparents were all Jewish.

In a 1959 article in Harper's Magazine, he summarily rejected all religious values and practice, especially the liberal Protestantism of continental Europe that began with Schleiermacher and culminated in the writings of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann.
(He had little to say about Roman Catholicism.)

In their place, he praised moralists such as the biblical prophets, the Buddha, and Socrates.

He argued that critical analysis and the acquisition of knowledge were liberating and empowering forces.

He forcefully criticized the fashionable liberal Protestantism of the 20th century as filled with contradictions and evasions, preferring the austerity of the book of Job and the Jewish existentialism of Martin Buber. Perhaps the best exposition of the part of Kaufmann's thinking touched on in this paragraph is his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy, although all of his books elaborated on his ideas to some extent.

Kaufmann wrote a good deal on the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers (the French existentialism of Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and Albert Camus interested him less). He edited the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. He disliked Heidegger's thinking and unclear writing.

Kaufmann did much to enhance the respectability of Nietzsche and Hegel studies in the English-speaking world. He is especially renowned for his translations and exegesis of Nietzsche, whom he saw as gravely misunderstood by English speakers, as a major early existentialist, and as an unwitting precursor, in some respects, to Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Kaufmann wrote that superficially

"...it also seems that as a philosopher [Nietzsche] represents a very sharp decline [from Kant and Hegel] ... because [Nietzsche] has no 'system.' Yet this argument is hardly cogent. ... Not only can one defend Nietzsche on this score ... but one must add that he had strong philosophic reasons for not having a system."

Kaufmann also sympathized with Nietzsche's acerbic criticisms of Christianity. However, there was also much in Nietzsche that Kaufmann faulted, writing that "my disagreements with [Nietzsche] are legion."

Regarding style, Kaufmann argued that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for example, is in parts badly written, melodramatic, or verbose, yet concluded that the book "is not only a mine of ideas, but also a major work of literature and a personal triumph."

"The variables of moral capacity" by David C. Thomasma,David N. Weisstub

"A Theory of Justice" byJohn Bordley Rawls,1971

John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy.
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He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard.
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His magnum opus A Theory of Justice (1971) is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy."

His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism,takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position."

Rawls employs a number of thought experiments—including the famous veil of ignorance
—to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice.

Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's thought "helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself."
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A Theory of Justice
is a widely-read book of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls.

It was originally published in 1971 and revised in both 1975 (for the translated editions) and 1999.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social contract.

The resultant theory is known as "Justice as Fairness", from which Rawls derives his two famous principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.
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Rawls argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality.

Central to this effort is :
an account of the circumstances of justice (inspired by David Hume),
and a fair choice situation (closer in spirit to Immanuel Kant) for parties facing such circumstances.

Principles of justice are sought to guide the conduct of the parties.
These parties face moderate scarcity, and they are neither naturally altruistic nor purely egoistic: they have ends which they seek to advance, but desire to advance them through cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms.

Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation (the original position with its veil of ignorance) within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice.

Under such constraints, Rawls believes that parties would find his favored principles of justice to be especially attractive, winning out over varied alternatives, including utilitarian and libertarian accounts.
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The First Principle of Justice

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.

The basic liberties of citizens are :
roughly speaking,
political liberty (i.e., to vote and run for office),
freedom of speech and assembly,
liberty of conscience,
freedom of personal property;
and freedom from arbitrary arrest.

However, he says:
liberties not on the list,
for example, the right to own certain kinds of property (e.g. means of production) and freedom of contract as understood by the doctrine of laissez-faire are not basic; and so they are not protected by the priority of the first principle.

The first principle is more or less absolute, and may not be violated, even for the sake of the second principle, above an unspecified but low level of economic development (i.e. the first principle is, under most conditions, lexically prior to the second principle).

However, because various basic liberties may conflict, it may be necessary to trade them off against each other for the sake of obtaining the largest possible system of rights.
There is thus some uncertainty as to exactly what is mandated by the principle, and it is possible that a plurality of sets of liberties satisfy its requirements.
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The Second Principle of Justice

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that :
a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).
b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

Rawls' claim in a is that departures from equality of a list of what he calls primary goods
– 'things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants' –
are justified only to the extent that they improve the lot of those who are worst
-off under that distribution in comparison with the previous, equal, distribution.

His position is at least in some sense egalitarian, with a proviso that equality is not to be achieved by worsening the position of the least advantaged.

An important consequence here, however, is that inequalities can actually be just on Rawls's view, as long as they are to the benefit of the least well off.

His argument for this position rests heavily on the claim that morally arbitrary factors (for example, the family we're born into) shouldn't determine our life chances or opportunities.

Rawls is also keying on an intuition that we do not deserve inborn talents,
thus we are not entitled to all the benefits we could possibly receive from them, meaning that at least one of the criteria which could provide an alternative to equality in assessing the justice of distributions is eliminated.

The stipulation in b is lexically prior to that in a.

"Fair equality of opportunity"
requires not merely that offices and positions are distributed on the basis of merit, but that all have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed.

It is often thought that this stipulation,
and even the first principle of justice,
may require greater equality than the difference principle,
because large social and economic inequalities,
even when they are to the advantage of the worst-off,
will tend to seriously undermine the value of the political liberties and any measures towards fair equality of opportunity.