Trust and Toleration

ISBN-13: 9780415329163 / Angielski / Twarda / 2004 / 192 str.

Richard H. Dees

Opis

Deep conflicts about religion have haunted the West from the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 to the destruction of the World Trade Center. The need for toleration in these cases seems self-evident, but cultivating it is deceptively difficult. This book outlines the social, conceptual, and psychological preconditions for toleration. By looking closely at the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France and England and at contemporary controversies about the rights of homosexuals, Richard Dees demonstrates how trust between the opposing parties is needed first, but in just these cases, distrust is all-too-rational. Ultimately, that distrust can only be overcome if the parties undergo a fundamental shift of values - a conversion. Only then can they accept some form of toleration. The historical cases demonstrate that even well-established practices of autonomy, democracy, and economic freedom are not enough to secure toleration. contextually-sensitive balance between practices that build trust, like those which help citizens develop a common identity, and those that sustain toleration, like public reason. Trust and Toleration will be of essential interest to advanced students and academics of philosophy and political philosophy.

Spis treści

Part One: Arguments for Toleration
Part Two: Trust and the Rationality of Toleration
Part Three: The Conversion to Toleration
Part Four: Establishing Toleration
Part Five: Of Socinians: Toleration and the Limits of Trust
Part Six: Of Homosexuals: Trust and the Practices of Public Reason

O autorze

Richard H. Dees is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1990 and taught at Saint Louis University from 1990-2003. Besides toleration, his research interests are in the philosophical and historical works of David Hume, in the political thought of the American Revolution, and in bioethics.