A philosophical enquiry into the concept of justice

Abstract

The author gives a historico-problematical account of the conceptions of justice beginning with the Greek mythic understanding (Hesiod), continuing with Plato’s determination of justice as the ideal of setting up a state and through Aristotel’s making immanent justice as the mean within experientially existing state arrangements and as the measured nature of partitive and corrective justice. The Christian tum towards the attribution of justice to the individual developed out of the theonomously conceived orientation towards God. Leibnitz’s understanding of justice is determined within the universalist- philosophical theory as the greatest moral norm. In addition, the author tersely presents the key thematic passages from Wolff, Hume, Locke, after which he elaborates the formal structure of the concept of justice as the preparatory step for the final consideration of J. Rawls’s Theory of justice and his central principle of the maximin.