Process Philosophy and Political Liberalism Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne

Argues for political liberalism as a process-oriented view and process philosophy as a politically liberal view

Daniel A. Dombrowski brings together the thought of the 20th-century philosophy's greatest political liberal, John Rawls, with the thought of the great process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. He shows that political liberalism is intimately linked with process philosophy, renaming it 'process liberalism'. He justifies this process liberalism in contrast to four potentially troublesome sources or influences: metaphysics, religion, right-wing politics and left-wing politics.

Dombrowski engages a series of interlocutors and alternative positions including Franklin I. Gamwell, Timothy D. Snyder, Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx. In conclusion, he offers a compelling, intricate and resourceful argument for nonhuman animal rights based on Rawlsian principles, which in turn forms the basis of a future environmental ethics.

Daniel A. Dombrowski is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of 18 books and over a hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics and literature. His recent books include Whitehead's Religious Thought: From Mechanism to Organism, From Force to Persuasion (SUNY, 2017), A History of the Concept of God: A Process Approach (SUNY, 2016), Rawlsian Explorations in Religion and Applied Philosophy (Penn State University Press, 2011), Contemporary Athletics and Ancient Greek Ideals (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Rethinking the Ontological Argument: A Neoclassical Theistic Response (Cambridge University Press, 2006).