Trinitarian Morality?

Tue, 01 Oct 1991 00:00:00 -0400

Transformed Judgment: Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life
by L. Gregory Jones
University of Notre Dame Press, 189 pages, $22.95

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Transcendental Subject

Sun, 01 Apr 1990 00:00:00 -0500

At the time of the publication of Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice in 1982, Oliver Sacks was writing many of the “clinical tales” for his remarkable The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. This chronological parallelism notwithstanding, nothing would seem more improbable than a bringing into dialogue of these two works, for not only do they spring from disciplines breathtakingly remote from one another (political theory, neurology), they appear to have radically different centers of interest. Sandel wishes to refute the moral epistemology underlying John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice and thereby call the entire Rawlsian contractual scheme into question. Sacks narrates episodes from his experience as a neurologist. As his patients suffer from bizarre afflictions like Tourette Syndrome, anosmia (loss of the sense of smell), and deficient proprioception (the ability to sense one’s own body), there is an unmistakable “freak show” appeal to the book. This accounts for its commercial success but also would seem to render it quite irrelevant to the preoccupations of Harvard political philosophy.

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Trinitarian Morality?

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Transcendental Subject