Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

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2. Introduction

   • Michael Campbell, Lynette Reid

   Pages 1-9

3. Moral Agency

   • Carolyn Wilde

   Pages 11-24

4. Ethics and Action

   • David Cockburn

   Pages 25-40

5. “What Justifies the Justifications?” Winch on Punishment and Justice

   • Lars Hertzberg

   Pages 41-55

6. Winch on Punishment: Contested Concepts, Justification, and Primitive Reactions

   • Lynette Reid

   Pages 57-83

7. Political Philosophy and the Primacy of Agency

   • Olli Lagerspetz

   Pages 85-102

8. Winch on Political Authority & Obedience

   • Marina Barabas

   Pages 103-115

9. Aspects of Period-Turns

   • Helen Geyer

   Pages 117-133

10. The Identity of Man – Winch Between Spinoza, Weil, and Wittgenstein

    • Sarah Tropper

    Pages 135-148

11. Weil and Wittgenstein in Winch’s “Reading”: Philosophy as a Way of Life

    • Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

    Pages 149-166

12. Wanting to Be Better: On the Self-Defeating Character of Moral Perfection

    • Kamila Pacovská

    Pages 167-182

13. Between Discovery and Decision: Winch’s Critique of the Universalizability of Moral Judgment Revisited

    • Takeshi Sato

    Pages 183-197

14. The Good and Bad in Sexual Relations: A Reconsideration of Winch’s Limiting Notions

    • Camilla Kronqvist

    Pages 199-215

15. Winch on First Philosophy: Unity and Multiplicity

    • Steven Burns

    Pages 217-230

16. Researching Education: Perspectives from Winch’s Approach to the Social Sciences

    • Christopher Winch

    Pages 231-249

17. “Don’t Mention the Idea of a Social Science”: The Legacy of an Idea

    • Mark Theunissen

    Pages 251-270

18. Winch and Animal Minds

    • Craig Taylor

    Pages 271-279

19. Back Matter

    Pages 281-286

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This volume is a reappraisal of the work of Peter Guy Winch (1926 -1997), one of the most important philosophers of the 20^th Century. Winch faded into relative obscurity compared to his contemporaries due to a mistaken belief that there are no systematic connections between the different aspects of his work. This volume corrects that presupposition and reintroduces Winch's work to a new generation of scholars. By showing how ethical, political and social issues are interrelated in Winch's work, and by making clear the connections between these issues and themes in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, the volume demonstrates both the breadth and the unity of Winch's approach. It discusses topics such as ethics, political philosophy, social science, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.  Despite this apparent variety of topics, the contributors to the volume share Winch's conviction that the different areas of philosophy are interdependent. As a result, the volume as a whole shows unity in diversity and provides an example of a manner of philosophising in which different approaches and sub-disciplines are placed in dialogue with each other.

Peter Guy Winch is most famous for his early work on the philosophy of the social sciences. His On the Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (ISS) generated controversy within both philosophical and social scientific circles. In that work and subsequent publications Winch argued against the presupposition that social relations could be understood using the conceptual tools of the natural sciences. Winch would later describe ISS as a 'young man's book' and would come to regret the reputation it garnered him - a mixture of roughly equal degrees fame and infamy. Alongside his work on the philosophy of social sciences, Winch was an interpreter and exegete of Wittgenstein. He also published a ground-breaking study ofthe philosophy of Simone Weil, entitled Simone Weil: The Just Balance. Winch also published numerous essays on issues in ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of religion, and at his death was working on a book manuscript on the problem of political authority.

• Authority and Reason
• Ethics and Politics
• Peter Winch
• Philosophy of Education
• Philosophy of Social Science
• Society and Ethics
• Winch on Spinoza
• Winch on Wittgenstein
• Wittgenstein and Ethics
• Weltanschauung and its Relation to Philosophy
• Moral Agency
• Wittgenstein and Winch on the Will
• Will, Punishment, and the Justification of Political Authority
• Winch on political authority
• Ethical Problems Regarding Power
• Ethical Problems Regarding Government
• Ethical Problems Regarding Law contra Conviction
• Winch on Universalisability
• Personal and the Universal in Morality
• Winch on human behaviour

• Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Pardubice, Czech Republic

  Michael Campbell

• Department of Bioethics, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada

  Lynette Reid

Michael Campbell is researcher at the Centre for Ethics in the University of Pardubice. He works on issues at the intersection of meta-ethics and normative moral philosophy, and is interested in bringing moral philosophy into discussion with psychology.

Lynette Reid is associate professor in the Bioethics Department at Dalhousie University, Canada. She completed a PhD on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with Winch at Illinois in the mid-1990s. She works on ethical, political, and philosophical issues in public health, focusing on cancer screening, the normative significance of health inequalities, and preferential access in universal health care syste s.

Policies and ethics