New book, Nature and Justice, from Professor Emeritus David Keyt

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus David Keyt on the publication of his new book Nature and Justice: Studies in the Ethical and Political Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (2017). The book is a compilation of articles spanning forty years of Professor Keyt's work on this topic, including both previously published and newly written articles. Significantly, Professor Keyt points out, this book is published exactly sixty years after he first joined the University of Washington in 1957. Quite an achievement indeed!

The publisher's summary of the book is as follows:

A collection of articles on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. The newly written introductory chapter offers a sketch of the metaphysical foundations of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethical and political philosophy. Two chapters on the Republic examine Plato’s account of justice and his use of the ship of state metaphor. The remainder of the book is devoted to Aristotle and discusses such topics as his view of the best life for a man, his political naturalism, his proto-anarchism, his theory of distributive justice, and his ideal polis. The final chapters, also newly written, address the unattractive features of Aristotle’s political ideal—natural slavery, the subordination of women, and the denigration of technical skill—and argue that these features are in fact inconsistent with the basic principles of his ethical and political philosophy. The volume ends with a defense of the claim that Aristotle’s political philosophy, once shorn of its excrescences, is updateable to the twenty-first century.