Robert Paul Wolff received a doctorate in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1957. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Massachusetts, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He has published twenty-one books on the history of modern philosophy, social and political philosophy, the philosophy of education, economics, and Afro-American Studies. Among his best-known books are Kant's Theory of Mental Activity and In Defense of Anarchism, which has just been translated into Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian. In 1992, he was invited to join the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies to assist in the establishment of a doctoral program, which he has coordinated since it was established in 1996. Wolff is now the director of the new university- wide Program for Undergraduate Mentoring and Achievement which provides mentoring and instructional services to traditionally underrepresented students in their first year at UMass. In 2005 Wolff published Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a meditation on the experience of joining an Afro-American Studies Department and what it taught him about America. In 1990, Wolff founded University Scholarships for South African Students, a charitable organization that offers financial aid to poor Black students studying at South Africa's historically Black universities and technikons.
For more than half a century, Philosopher Robert Paul Wolff has been thinking and writing about the great figures of eighteenth century philosophy, such as Kant and Hume, and about the ideals and realities of American higher education. In this first volume of his collected published and unpublished papers, a number of those writings are collected and made available.
For thirty-five years, Robert Paul Wolff has been carrying on a deep study of the tradition of social and economic theory that started with the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and was brought to its highest point of development by Karl Marx. In these essays and papers, we see Wolff working through the several aspects of Marx's thought and bringing them into fruitful and unified conjuncture.
From Robert Paul Wolff's popular blog, the Philosopher's Stone, comes a series of "Tutorials", "Mini-Tutorials", "Micro-Tutorials" and "Appreciations" on topics such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Kiekegaard, Max Weber, Ideological Critique, Afro-American Studies, and more.
For fifty-five years, Robert Paul Wolff has been reflecting on the theory of modern political society and engaging actively in a number of progressive political movements. The volume opens with a brief Credo for Progressives, in which Wolff forthrightly states the moral and political commitment that has shaped his life and writings.
Political Theory has been transformed in the last thirty years by the introduction of methods of analysis imported from mathematics and economics. This little book, by well-known philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, lays out the elements of these technical subjects in a precise fashion that achieves a sprightly accessibility without sacrificing formal rigor.
The Autonomy of Reason reflects Wolff’s determination to get out of Kant’s system what is good and to get out of Kant’s system for good. Readers will certainly benefit from Wolff’s two decades of intense study of Kant. Wolff does not see his task as one of either historical exegesis or philosophical criticism. In the place of both Wolff proposes a “philosophical reconstruction” of the text.
A delightful journey that takes the author from his second year of life to his seventy-fourth. Along the way, Wolff gives us an inside look at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia, the University of Massachusetts, and a variety of other institutions of higher learning in the United States and South Africa.
Karl Marx's great work, Capital, has intrigued and puzzled readers for more than a century by its mystifyingly intricate arguments and dramatic literary embellishments. In this book, Robert Paul Wolff dispels much of the mystery surrounding Capital by providing a literary-philosophical analysis of the text and of Marx's intentions.
This book explains the central passage of the “Transcendental Analytic” of the Critique of Pure Reason. It proceeds in the manner of a textual commentary, discussing and explaining each section of the Analytic in turn. The purpose, however, is not merely to comment chapter by chapter on what Kant has written, but rather to reorganise and interpret his argument so that it is coherent and connected.
This book explains the development of the classical theory of value from Adam Smith to Karl Marx in a form readily accessible to readers unfamiliar with anything more than elementary arithmetic, while at the same time offering to the specialist a fundamental criticism of Marxian political economy and an original and controversial interpretation of Capital.
Since its publication in 1971, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has been the subject of a lively debate among philosophers, economists, and political scientists. In this book, Robert Paul Wolff provides an interpretation and critique of Rawls’ theory that both clarifies it and reveals its basic flaws.
Wolff provides here an examination of four concepts central to liberal political concerns: Liberty, Tolerance, Loyalty, and Power. We need, Wolff states, an ideal of society more exalted than the mere acceptance of opposed interests and diverse customs. We need, moreover, a new philosophy of community, and in his last chapter Wolff undertakes to outline the first steps toward such a philosophy.