Finding a Reasonable Foundation for Peace
Journal Title: Studia Gilsoniana - Year 2017, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
Can world peace come about through a world federation of governments? Is growing agreement and appreciation for, throughout the world, the doctrine of equal human rights inevitable? Such questions are raised by Mortimer Adler in How to Think about War and Peace. Adler argues in this book that both are possible, and in doing so he argues that the insights of liberal contract thinkers, particularly Immanuel Kant, are essentially true. Kant argues that each person has the capacity to discover within himself the foundation for human rights because they are self-evident. It follows that over time inequalities and prejudices will disappear, and people will gain the freedom to advance the cause of peace. About this account of the possibility of world peace I ask the question: is it indeed reasonable? For if it is reasonable, it is not reasonable for the reasons that would have been advanced by Aristotle or Plato or their medieval followers. In older political philosophy it is agreement about the unchanging truth of things that can bring peace. To seek the unchanging truth of things, philosophical speculation about God and things divine, is the highest human activity. It is that end to which life in this world is directed, and upon which human flourishing depends. Freedom depends upon our openness to unchanging eternal truth, even more than self-evident rights; the exercise of speculative reasoning allows for political discourse and an open society.
Authors and Affiliations
Roberta Bayer
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP252278
- DOI -
- Views 252
- Downloads 0
REDPATH ON THE NATURE OF PHILOSOPHY
In this article the author discusses Peter A. Redpath’s understanding of the nature of philosophy and his account of how erroneous understandings of philosophy have led to the decline of the West and to the separation of...
ON “THE CONTINGENCY OF OUR OWN BEATITUDE.” SOME REFLECTIONS ON GILSON’S “THE FUTURE OF AUGUSTINIAN METAPHYSICS”
Inspired by selected passages from Wendell Berry’s story “A Place in Time,” the article discusses Étienne Gilson’s essay “The Future of Augus-tinian Metaphysics.” Augustinian metaphysics, according to Gilson, begins with...
THE QUESTION “WHY?” AS THE FOUNDATION FOR KNOWLEDGE OF CAUSES IN ARISTOTLE
According to Aristotle, philosophical knowledge consists in the discovery of the first causes that occur in reality. For this reason, the quantitative and essential analysis of the causes was the fundamental task for phi...
Personal Participation in the Thomistic Account of Natural Law
The author seeks to show how participation serves as a focal point of a Thomistic personalist account of natural law. While Aquinas himself does not invoke the concept of person in his account of natural law, the author...
To See a City Come into Being in Speech: Genus and Analogy in Plato’s Republic
An understanding of the philosophical genus contributes to the perfection of the act of the philosophical habit of the human soul because reality is constituted by a multitude of overlapping genera. Because genera are co...