Rawls' lectures must have been quite interesting and fun to attend. I found the book interesting reading. (I liked WIggins' Twelve Lectures more.) I wish it had changed more of my views, or any. I suppose I have not read carefully enough. Nevertheless, I still do not see that Kant offers a sensible account of morality or political theory, nor Hegel. Kant's philosophy still seems to be a kind of mysticism. I suppose a big part of my difficulty is with the talk of pure reason and the like, and the unyielding commitment to human beings as distinct from the remainder of the world. It would work for the religious, but it is not consistent with seeing the world as we live in it. One could, I suppose, just stick the two ways of thinking together, a sort of intellectual sandwich. But where is the link, the peanut butter as it were? In Kant, one just has a kind of ipse dixit that there are two ways of thinking and they somehow fit together. But no real explanation. In the context of morality, there is no route from the pure practical reason to this world. The Categorical Imperative does not get anywhere because it is not about events or acts at all. There is overt rejection of reason within causation. Well, I am repeating myself. What I want to say is the lectures are worth reading and provocative. Ever so important for me to say.
I think next I will go through Parfit's book. (Like many, I have a PDF of a draft; unlike many I am not reading hundreds of pages on a computer screen so I have never read the draft.) One thing I am anxious (interested? curious?) about is how Parfit connects his account of identity and personhood to his moral theory. After that, I think I will re-read some Mackie.
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