“... commission’s few remaining members resigned en masse, citing lack of progress.The​ sociologist John Goldthorpe has spent almost fifty years developing and championing his version of the class analysis approach. It has become the international norm in sociological research and is the basis of the categorisation used by the UK’s Office for National ...”

“... intuition and ordinary belief are treated by serious non-utilitarian philosophers such as Kant and Rawls. Nor does he show us any reason why, having thrown over the traces of convention, we should choose to be utilitarians, rather than Kantians: none of the questions separating those two traditions is so much as mentioned. Only a philosophically illiterate ...”

“... underlying, law on which economics have no purchase; here, he says: ‘I take my stand with the John Stuart Mill of On Liberty (1859), the classic statement of classical liberalism. On Liberty argues that every person is entitled to the maximum liberty – both personal and economic – consistent with the liberty of every other person in the ...”

“... real, and not necessarily especially ‘moderate’, if that is taken to mean weak. For instance, John Passmore’s Man’s Responsibility for Nature puts forward a spread of alternatives, all of which call for quite drastic action. But it is moderate in that it always gives its reasons, treats opponents honestly and respectfully, strongly objects to ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... contenders would still be left in the field with no way of making a case for one over another. John Rawls’s conception in A Theory of Justice of a ‘veil of ignorance’, blotting out all information that is (according to Rawls) morally irrelevant, would be one construction, but an inherently controversial ...”

“... herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... functional source that justice as a value embodying fairness and equity has to be derived. Neither Rawls nor Dworkin can prove why it is justice in this sense that matters; nor need they so long as we endorse the moral sensibility which says that it does. It is perhaps significant that in an era when equality in other fields has either imploded or been ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... of them focusing on the nature of animal consciousness or our relationships with other species. John Bradshaw’s In Defence of Dogs (2011), Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014), the primatologist Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) and the ‘scuba-diving philosopher’ Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other ...”

“... left a lasting mark. Good political thought, for Ankersmit, was never of the sort personified by Rawls: an abstract system of principles detached from concrete reality. It was always a response to urgent historical problems, produced by thinkers – Bodin, Hobbes, Locke, Burke or Tocqueville – who were immersed in the great conflicts of their ...”

“... need for religion, even if they can dispense with god.4 Last but not least is the contention – Rawls and Habermas resonant, official pronouncements galore – that all major religious creeds are basically at one, sharing a treasury of common values with liberal humanism in a ‘post-secular age’: a celestial pensée unique to match the terrestrial ...”