[SydPhil] Philosophy @ UNSW, Next Tuesday: Dr Thomas Besch

[Joanne Faulkner]

Date:               Tuesday 12 March
Time:              1 p.m.
Venue:           Morven Brown 310, University of NSW
                        (map reference C20: (1.7MB)<http://www.facilities.unsw.edu.au/Maps/pdf/kensington.pdf>)

Dr Thomas Besch (University of Sydney)

Political Liberalism, The Internal Conception, and The Problem of Public Dogma
According to the “internal” conception (Quong), political liberalism aims to be publicly justifiable only to people who are reasonable in a sense specified and advocated by political liberalism itself. One advantage of the internal conception allegedly is that it enables liberalism to avoid perfectionism. The paper takes issue with this view. It argues that once the internal conception is duly pitched at its fundamental, metatheoretical level and placed in its proper discursive context, it emerges that it comes at the cost of public dogma. The paper examines this problem and argues that a plausible response to this problem is to go beyond the internal conception and adopt a more inclusive, dynamic conception. But this calls for a form of perfectionism. Thus, the internal conception of political liberalism, far from showing how liberalism can be had without perfectionism, effectively calls for perfectionism as a remedy for its problems.


Thomas Besch lectures in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and his areas of research include contemporary political and moral philosophy. He has published articles in Dialogue, European Journal of Philosophy, and Journal of Value Inquiry, among other journals, and, in German language, a book on the philosophy of John Rawls.


Coordinator:
Dr Joanne Faulkner, j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au
School of Humanities



Dr Joanne Faulkner
ARC DECRA Research Fellow
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Room 338, Morven Brown Building
University of New South Wales
Kensington, NSW 2052
Australia

j.faulkner at unsw.edu.au
+61 2 9385 2287
http://humanities.arts.unsw.edu.au/staff/joanne-faulkner-633.html

http://unsw.academia.edu/JoanneFaulkner

Co-Government/Institutional Representative, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy: http://www.ascp.org.au

Branch Vice-President, UNSW Branch of the NTEU, National Tertiary Education Industry Union: http://www.nteu.edu.au
NTEU Office Tel: +61 2 9385 2479, email: nteu at unsw.edu.au<mailto:nteu at unsw.edu.au>
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