ORCID Profile
0000-0002-8792-5131
Current Organisation
The University of Newcastle
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-07-2016
Abstract: There is an increasingly prevalent view among some contemporary Locke scholars that Locke's political philosophy is thoroughly subordinate to theological imperatives, centered on natural law. This article challenges this point of view by critically evaluating this interpretation of Locke as advanced by some of its leading proponents. This interpretation perceives natural law as the governing principle of Locke's political philosophy, and the primary source of transition and reconciliation within it. This article advances a very different reading of Locke's political philosophy, perceiving within it competing imperatives that cannot be subsumed by natural law, and are, in some respects, at odds with it. In this way, the article shows how the “theological” interpretation of Locke's political philosophy, centred on natural law, fails to account for some of that philosophy's fundamental features, and is unable to explain some of its key outcomes, with the result that this interpretation falls short of its critical ambitions.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 23-09-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-03-2013
Abstract: This article challenges a prominent interpretation of the liberal tradition which seeks to ide that tradition, from its origins, into two competing strands, one committed to reason (however defined) as a normative ideal, and the other, involving no such ideal, centred on a commitment either to negative liberty or the political management of ersity. This dichotomous account seeks to enlist the inaugural figures of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and in one case John Stuart Mill as the origins of that part of the liberal tradition committed to reason. This article will show that such claims have no foundation in the most inaugural figure cited, and that, as a consequence, liberalism, from its origins, has had a far deeper commitment to negative liberty and ersity than to any necessary connection with reason.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 10-06-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2010
Abstract: John Gray has acquired international prominence and notoriety for his trenchant and uncompromising critique of the liberal tradition. According to Gray, the pervasive value pluralism that characterizes the contemporary world has rendered liberalism, and in particular its theory of toleration, both historically redundant and theoretically obsolete as a means of ensuring peaceful coexistence between competing values and practices. Gray insists that his alternative political framework of modus vivendi is far more capable of achieving these outcomes. This paper challenges Gray’s account of the liberal tradition, and its theory of toleration, revealing the shortcomings of that account at a historical and philosophical level. It argues that liberalism emerged in a European context characterized by precisely the sort of pluralism that Gray associates with the contemporary world, and was specifically conceived to deal with it in a manner which is still relevant today. In this way, it is possible to rescue the liberal tradition from the theoretical obsolescence and historical redundancy to which Gray seeks to consign it.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 18-08-2009
Abstract: This article challenges the claim that John Locke’s arguments for toleration are fundamentally at odds with any we might now associate with the liberal tradition. By showing how this perspective fundamentally misreads Locke on toleration, it seeks to defend Locke’s own status as one of the founding fathers of the liberal tradition.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 13-01-2023
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 10-06-2016
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-1997
DOI: 10.1177/019145379702300404
Abstract: The Enlightenment heritage has meant that we have tended to conceive of tradition as inevitably opposed to reason, and that the exten sion of one as a major constitutive element in social affairs, implies the retraction of the other. However, this paper attempts to conceive the relationship between tradition and reason in a more articulated context, suggesting that this dichotomy between reason and tradition may itself be what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls an 'Enlightenment prejudice'. By drawing on the work of thinkers within a broad hermeneutic tradition, this paper attempts to articulate an alternative means of thinking about the relation ship between reason and tradition, which suggests that it is only when we adopt a particular Enlightenment perspective that we are hermeneutically confined to confirming Enlightenment presuppositions that there is such a dichotomy between reason and tradition.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-11-2010
DOI: 10.1111/J.1467-9248.2009.00808.X
Abstract: This article discusses John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). It challenges what has been described as ‘the most influential critique of the argument of the Letter written by a contemporary philosopher’ – that of Jeremy Waldron. It also engages with a recent response to Waldron's critique within the pages of Political Studies by Paul Bou-Habib. It argues that both Waldron and Bou-Habib are in error in their accounts of Locke's theory of toleration. It argues that Waldron is egregiously in error in his claim that Locke, in his defence of toleration, identified with the interests of the persecutors at the expense of their victims. Even Waldron's most recent work on Locke, which emphasises the religious foundations of Locke's defence of toleration, fails to overcome the shortcomings of his critique in this regard.
Publisher: Telos Press
Date: 1998
DOI: 10.3817/1298110009
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 29-02-2012
Abstract: Timothy Stanton is the latest in a line of Locke scholars who, in focusing on Locke’s theological commitments, have sought to place these at the center of his political philosophy. Stanton insists that those who interpret Locke’s political philosophy in more material terms, centered on in idual liberty, government authority, and the need to reconcile both via consent, apply to it a misleading “picture” and fail to perceive its essentials. By showing that this is precisely how Locke himself intended his political philosophy to be understood, with the theology substantially removed, this article shows how Stanton is profoundly mistaken in his interpretation of Locke.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 21-05-2023
DOI: 10.1111/AJPH.12888
Abstract: “No‐Platforming” has increased in prominence within Australia in recent years. Furthermore, it has moved from university c uses to more mainstream sectors of the Australian public sphere. The “no‐platforming” of an audience member on an ABC current affairs programme in March 2022 is evidence of this. By focussing on the arguments for and against no‐platforming, as well as this incident, this article seeks to show their wider significance for no‐platforming in Australia, and the implications of this for freedom of speech within the Australian public sphere.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 23-09-2021
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 23-09-2021
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 23-09-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-1997
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-01-2013
Abstract: A “recent consensus” has emerged in Locke studies that has sought to place theology at the center of Locke's political philosophy, insisting that the validity and cogency of Locke's political conclusions cannot be substantiated independently of the theology that resides at their foundation. This paper argues for the need to distance Locke from God, claiming that not only can we “bracket” the normative conclusions of Locke's political philosophy from their theological foundations, but that this was in fact Locke's own intention, intent as he was to justify these conclusions to a erse political audience often ided by faith. In other words, this “recent consensus” in Locke studies is premised on an erroneous understanding of Locke's political philosophy, even as advanced by Locke himself. Locke's own philosophical discourse bears witness to the very “bracketing” of his political conclusions from their theological foundations that these Locke scholars claim is impossible.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date: 07-2023
DOI: 10.1086/724848
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-02-2016
DOI: 10.1111/AJPS.12245
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2016
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 10-06-2016
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2009
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2010
Abstract: The political philosopher John Gray is a foremost critic of the liberal tradition. But while many have engaged with Gray concerning aspects of this tradition, few have challenged Gray’s conception of the tradition as a whole. Yet it is precisely this broader, background element in Gray’s account that is most problematic and that requires excavation if we are to reveal the deeper shortcomings of his critique as a whole. This article challenges Gray’s claim, made in 2000, that the liberal tradition is capable of being understood in terms of two faces — one representing the ‘universalist’ aspects of that tradition and the other representing the more pragmatic, value-pluralist, modus vivendi aspects. By focusing on Gray’s erroneous interpretation of the key universalist figure of John Locke, we see how his dichotomous account of the liberal tradition collapses at both ends. The article then looks at Gray’s most recent defence of his critique of liberalism, in 2007, and shows how many of the errors that characterize his 2000 account are compounded in 2007 as Gray seeks to build on his earlier position in contradictory directions. In all these ways therefore, this article seeks to defend the integrity of the liberal tradition by showing how Gray’s excoriating critique falls short.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 19-10-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2008
Abstract: This article looks at liberalism as a political tradition encompassing competing and, at times, incommensurable values. It looks in particular at the potential conflict between the values of free speech and equal respect. Both of these are foundational values for liberalism, in the sense that they arise as normative ideals from the very inception of the liberal tradition itself. Yet from the perspective of this tradition, it is by no means clear which of these values should be prioritized in those instances where they come into conflict. This article insists that the only way these two values can be meaningfully weighed against each other is if their competition can be understood within the broader framework of liberalism and democracy. Within this broader framework it is possible to find criteria which enable us to choose between these values in a non-circular manner — i.e. in ways which do not already presuppose a commitment to the value we wish to support.
No related grants have been discovered for John Tate.