A Contextual Approach to Political Philosophy

My aims in this paper are to describe and motivate the adoption of what I call a contextual approach to political philosophy. I will first provide a brief characterization of contextualism. I will then contrast contextualism against more common approaches to political philosophy, which I call idealist or schematic, and indicate the problems I see with those approaches and the relative advantages of contextualism. By doing this, I hope to demonstrate the need for further work exploring the possibilities of contextualism.