The Responsibility of Reason

Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age

By (author) Ralph Hancock

Not available to order

Publication date:

16 January 2011

Length of book:

346 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442207394

Can we run our lives and govern our societies by reason? The question provoked Socrates to redirect philosophic inquiry in a political direction, and it has remained fundamental to Western thought. Martin Heidegger explored this problem in his profound critique of the Western metaphysical tradition, and Leo Strauss responded to Heidegger with an attempt to recover the classical idea of the rule of reason. In The Responsibility of Reason, Ralph C. Hancock undertakes no less than to answer the Heideggerian challenge. Offering trenchant and original interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger, Strauss, and Alexis de Tocqueville, he argues that Tocqueville saw the essential more clearly than apparently deeper philosophers. Hancock addresses political theorists on the question of the grounding of liberalism, and, at the same time, philosophers on the most basic questions of the meaning and limits of reason. Moreover, he shows how these questions are for us inseparable.

Preface
Chapter 1: Reason's Meaning and Responsibility in a Liberal-Democratic Age
Chapter 2: The Crisis of "Moral Analogy" and the Problem of the Rule of Reason
Chapter 3: The Rule of Reason and Paradoxes of Transcendence
Chapter 4: Heidegger's Rejection and Radicalization of Modern Transcendence
Chapter 5: Leo Strauss and the Nobility of Philosophy
Chapter 6: Tocqueville's Responsible Reason
Chapter 7: Reason's Postmodern Responsibility
Index

Ralph C. Hancock has written a book that combines thinking at the highest level with deep moral seriousness and an admirable attentiveness to the requirements of political responsibility. His theme is the relationship between theory and practice, politics and philosophy, a subject that he explores with rare depth. He sets out to restore a conception of reason that is truly open to the transcendent purposes and norms that provide reason’s compass, and thus avoids the illusion that philosophy is a radically 'autonomous' enterprise, even as it never forgets its debts to ordinary experience and decent politics.