Nenad Miščević (1950-2024) was a world-renowned Croatian philosopher working in the analytic tradition.
Thought Experiments in Political Philosophy brings together twelve of Miščević’s papers on thought experiments in political philosophy published between 2012 and 2022 in academic journals and edited volumes. In the papers, he discusses famous works of political philosophy—such as Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, and Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, interpreting them as thought experiments. He argues that the mental model building from a third-person perspective can account for political thought experiments like the former, while the mental model forming from a first-person perspective, which usually involves mental simulation, is more suitable for the latter cases.
As a normative political theory, Miščević advocates a variant of sentimentalist contractualism, illustrating it on an imagined debate about one of the burning present-day political issues, namely the migration crisis and the rights of migrants.
Miomir Matulović is Professor of Theory of Law and State, and Philosophy of Law, at the University of Rijeka (retired).