Interfaith dialogue: Ethics
Hamilton, Edith and Huntington Cairns, eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.
All the writings of Plato generally considered to be authentic are here presented in the only complete one-volume Plato available in English. The editors set out to choose the contents of this collected edition from the work of the best British and American translators of the last 100 years, ranging from Jowett (1871) to scholars of the present day. The volume contains prefatory notes to each dialogue, by Edith Hamilton; an introductory essay on Plato’s philosophy and writings, by Huntington Cairns; and a comprehensive index which seeks, by means of cross references, to assist the reader with the philosophical vocabulary of the different translators.
Kant, Immanuel. On History, Lewis White Beck, ed. New York and London: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963.
Immanuel Kant was a philosopher, with a philosophy that seems singularly unlikely to encourage a philosopher to take history seriously. The intelligible world under universal moral law and the world of nature under universal causal law seem the upper and lower millstones of this philosophy, between which all life would be crushed out of history.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government, edited by C B. Macpherson. Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge, UK: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1980.
The Second Treatise is one of the most important political treatises ever written and one of the most far-reaching in its influence. Locke describes a theoretical “state of nature” from which civil society emerges through rational, voluntary association.
Thornton, Bruce. Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000.
In the classics departments of today’s universities, Bruce Thornton says, the Greeks are accused of stealing their achievements from black Egyptians, of oppressing their wives and daughters, and of hypocritically speculating about freedom while holding slaves. Most of all, classic Greek culture has come under attack precisely because its glorious achievement, extended into history, is what defines the West and makes it distinct. In Greek Ways, Thornton clears away these misconceptions. Writing with wit and erudition, he discusses in fascinating detail those areas of Greek life – sexuality and sexual roles; slavery and war; philosophy and politics – that some modern critics have made into “contested sites.” Perhaps more importantly, he also reclaims the importance of those core ideas the Greeks invented, ideas about human fate and purpose that have shaped the modern world. Nearly seventy years ago, Edith Hamilton published The Greek Way, a book that educated two generations of readers about the debt we owe the handful of city-states that developed “the spirit of the West” some 2500 years ago. Bruce Thornton’s Greek Ways is for our time what Hamilton’s book was for a prior era: a classic inquiry holding up a mirror to Greek culture in which we can see ourselves.
Wilson, James Q. The Moral Sense. New York, The Free Press, 1993.
James Q. Wilson has taken an unfashionable, but undeniable crucial question about our moral nature, and produced a bracing, elegant, carefully researched and closely argued book.
