Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne
Daniel A. Dombrowski brings together the thought of the 20th-century philosophy’s greatest political liberal, John Rawls, with the thought of the great process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. He shows that political liberalism is intimately linked with process philosophy, renaming it ‘process liberalism’. He justifies this process liberalism in contrast to four potentially troublesome sources or influences: metaphysics, religion, right-wing politics and left-wing politics. Dombrowski engages a series of interlocutors and alternative positions including Franklin I. Gamwell, Timothy D. Snyder, Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx. In conclusion, he offers a compelling, intricate and resourceful argument for nonhuman animal rights based on Rawlsian principles, which in turn forms the basis of a future environmental ethics.
About the Author
Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of twenty-three books and over two-hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature. Among his books are Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism: Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). His latest book is The Way of Reason in Religion and Politics: The Philosophy of Franklin I. Gamwell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2026). He is the Editor of the journal Process Studies and is Past-President of the Metaphysical Society of America.
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