Hi All, On March 18, 12 - 2 pm, the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy 2011 Seminar Series features Professor Paul Patton, UNSW, who will be giving a paper entitled, "Government and Public Reason."
This event will take place at the Bankstown campus of UWS, Building 3, Room 3.G.54. Professor Patton's abstract is included below, and here is the link to future presentations of the CCPP Seminar Series: http://www.uws.edu.au/ccpp/citizenship_and_public_policy/seminar_series Government and Public Reason Foucault and Rawls represent very different approaches to political philosophy. Whereas the former pursues a resolutely descriptive approach to the techniques, strategies and forms of rationality of power, the latter pursues an explicitly normative approach in setting out and arguing for principles of justice that should inform the government of society conceived as a fair system of cooperation. I propose to show that the distance between them is less extreme than might be supposed and that the differences between them are instructive. Both approaches converge on the analysis of particular conceptions of the functions of government and its appropriate institutions and policies. Rawls recognizes that a theory of justice will have implications for the way that society should be governed and that these should be spelt out and examined in order to test that theory. Foucault is concerned with actual historical conceptions of government, but with a view to normative questions about a more acceptable form of government. Rawls reminds us that normative questions are an inescapable dimension of any genealogy of liberal or neo-liberal government that aspires to be critical, while Foucault’s historical analysis of governmentality draws attention to a neglected dimension of Rawls’s discussions of public political culture. _________________________________________________ Prof. Nikolas Kompridis | Professorial Fellow Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy University of Western Sydney | Bankstown Campus Locked Bag 1797 Penrith, NSW, 2751 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 9772 6673 http://www.uws.edu.au/ccpp/citizenship_and_public_policy/people/professor_nikolas_kompridis _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info 971 subscribers now served. To UNSUBSCRIBE, change your MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS, find ANSWERS TO COMMON PROBLEMS, or visit our ONLINE ARCHIVES, please go to the LIST INFORMATION PAGE: http://sydphil.info
