Religion and Public Reasons: Introduction

Abstract:     
This Introduction to my Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays Volume V (Oxford University Press 2011), published in the United Kingdom in early April, and in the United States in early May 2011, introduces the volume’s 24 published and unpublished essays, and follows the volume’s division into four Parts: Religion in Public Reason and Law; Bases for Accepting Revelation; Conscience and Faith; and Controversies. The first two-thirds of the Introduction is, in effect, a brief new essay on both the idea of public reason and the inherent and contingent elements in the relations between state and religion, the light of both the distinction and the overlap between and natural reason and revelation. The Introduction, like the volume, intersects with the Introductions to, and contents of, each of the other volumes in the five-volume set, which is published just before the second edition of Natural Law and Natural Rights, reformatted to accompany the set and incorporating a 65-page Postscript. The Collected Essays are I Reason in Action, II Intention and Identity, III Human Rights and Common Good, IV Philosophy of Law, V Religion and Public Reasons. Each volume includes the index for the set, and the author’s bibliography.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 15

Keywords: philosophy of law, moral and political philosophy, theology, religious ethics, Catholic Church

Accepted Paper Series