This essay situates cosmopolitanism within a logic of value judgements. This perspective gives a central place to difference. Cosmopolitanism presents a distinct problem: the plurality of ways of thinking about the world requires us to acknowledge the possiblity of a logic of alterity, through which we acknowledge the limits of one way of reasoning when confronted with others. The essay examines the legitimacy of this approach, presenting it as a strategic reorientation of the framework within which we reason about ways of living in the process of reasoning about values.
Patrick O’Donovan and Laura Rascaroli, eds, The Cause of Cosmopolitanism: Dispositions, Models, Transformations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 115–33
Accepted manuscript: institutional repository