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Especially well-known to non-philosophers is [[John Rawls]] (1921 - 2002) (political and moral philosophy) author of ''A Theory of Justice'' (1971), ''Political Liberalism'' (1993), ''The Law of Peoples'' (1999), and ''Justice as Fairness: A Restatement'' (2001).
Especially well-known to non-philosophers is [[John Rawls]] (1921 - 2002) (political and moral philosophy) author of ''A Theory of Justice'' (1971), ''Political Liberalism'' (1993), ''The Law of Peoples'' (1999), and ''Justice as Fairness: A Restatement'' (2001).
==The Genesis of "Philosophizing"==
Paradoxically, the impetus and driving force for philosophizing is not so much love of wisdom, at least, at first, but rather the eradication of frustration, pain, "thwartedness", and incompleteness or unfulfillment - all of which come to our lives in the process of our growth forcing themselves upon our awareness. The reason "why" comes about, first of all, to provide an alleviation or a solution. The "problem of pain" arises because there is actual pain, political philosophy because of the discomfiture of people in their aggregates and groupings and the outworkings one with another, philosophy of history because of the need to understand so as not to undergo what has been undergone already, or conversly, to learn, inorder to repeat what was deemed good, etc.
As the experiences or facets subsummed under each branch of Philosophy are multitudenous, the "why", that is, the solution or explanation, becomes that which unifies, simplifies in the sense that it points to what is behind it all, and more comprehensive. The "location" of the "why" for much of philosophy has been found either outside the processees and material of discussion, that is the explanatory principal is "transcendent", or found within, that is, the principal is "immanent". An example of the latter sees in the many (transitory) changes before our eyes the one true reality - the one blazing fire and not the tongues of flame, the one river and not the continually different passing waters, the one deity within all the gods, the one Godhead expressed by and within the whole created matter (pantheism), the eastern Atman is Brahman, where the individual soul is the world soul. A discussion of "causality becomes very much a discussion of manifestation of what is, of "epiphany".
On the other hand, when the explanatory principal is transcendant, that is, outside, "causality" comes to the fore as well as "purpose", " plan", and "intent", and, of course , the Being who is Himself "on the outside" of the creation, God. Even to call God a "He" and not an "it" points to our own value of what we know as ''personality'' and positing the greater fulfillment of this "Outside". Sometimes, there is a fluidity from one to another as in the Philosophy of History, One can see the transition from
1. the ''transcendent'' Biblical God who intervenes in History and the prophets who produces a ''linear'' understanding of history by proclaiming a future kingdom that could be different than the past, according to how we live, in distinction to the previous ''cyclical '' histories of the ancient Near East.
2. to the linear but ''immanent'' principal of F. Hegel which sees that developing Idea within the matter of History itself, developing according to a thesis, producing its opposite, an antithesis, leading to combination of both, a synthesis.
3. to the denuded of all Idea and spirit but retaining the linear history as vestige, now Marxism's "mechanistic" principal of utopian Dialectical Materialism - thesis, antithesis, antithesis of Class struggle.
"Revelation to" man, such as is provided by the God declared in the Old and New Testaments, rather than "manifestation within" man (and all else) is the natural complement for the quest that man sets before himself for the solutions, fulfillments, alleviations, etc, required by his very living, and to which Philosophy addresses itself.
== See also ==
== See also ==