An Introduction to Political Philosophy

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The ability to describe the main arguments for and against the main positions in the some main debates in political philosophy. Jonathan Wolff's An Introduction to Political Philosophy is still the best introduction to the subject that I know. It guides the reader through deep questions in a way that is clear, approachable and thought-provoking." - Professor Michael Rosen, Department of Government, Harvard University, USA Callicles A theory which closely resembles that of Antiphon is attributed by Plato to Callicles in the dialogue Gorgias, According to Plato, Callicles held that Nature is governed by the law of force, while civil and moral laws are normally the result of contracts made by the weak to defraud the strong of what their strength would otherwise secure for them. In a state of nature the survival of thefitwould be the effective rule of life, whereas the laws of society frequently reverse this principle and compel the strong to assist the weak. Callicles thought that his theory was supported by the considerations that in both the animal kingdom and the sphere of international relations,1 in neither of which there are restrictive laws, the rule of force is the operative principle. Hence, Callicles concludes, the rule of force is natural, and should not be opposed by the laws of society. It is not clear from what Plato tells us about Callicles* theory whether (to put the point in modern terms) he was defending a naturalistic theory of morality by defining 'right' in terms of 'might', or whether he was merely arguing that, as a matter of fact, it is morally desirable that the strong should get their way. The fact that he tried to deduce what ought to happen in human society from what does happen in the animal kingdom suggests that the This second edition also goes beyond any other anthology on the market in its coverage of traditionally under-represented views such as libertarianism, neo-socialism, feminism, and critical race theory. And it is one of the only anthologies to go beyond A Theory of Justice in its coverage of the political thought of John Rawls.

Introduction to Political Philosophy - Yale University PLSC 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy - Yale University

Political philosophy contains some of the greatest writings in the western intellectual tradition, as well as highly stimulating contemporary contributions. This online course introduces the student to classic and contemporary texts in the context of approaching some central questions in political philosophy concerning, the state, democracy, liberty and justice.For example, whether or not 'the good' can be defined as 'the desired*, it is quite a distinct question whether a proposition such as 'Benevolence is good' is a priori or empirical. The British economist, philosopher, and ethical theorist’s argument does not focus on “the so-called Liberty of the Will…but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Mill asks and answers provocative questions relating to the boundaries of social authority and individual sovereignty. In powerful and persuasive prose, he declares that there is “one very simple principle” regarding the use of coercion in society — one may only coerce others either to defend oneself or to defend others from harm. … The second alternative has been called the 'Naturalistic' Theory of Morality by Professor G.E.Moore. See his Principia Ethica, Chapter II: The works listed so far have all been written by — and mostly for — men. In the development of modern Western societies, women were largely excluded from the political arena in both literal and theoretical terms — until great thinkers like English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft began making waves with powerful works like her 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she challenged the dominant narrative that women shouldn’t receive a rational education. An exploration of the life and political essays of 20th century philosopher, Hannah Arendt. Dana Villa analyses Arendt's pathbreaking studies on totalitarianism, power, evil, and political theory.

Nine Best Introductory Political Philosophy Books The Nine Best Introductory Political Philosophy Books

Some main problems of political philosophy, including the authority of the state, the justification of democracy, the place of liberty, the distribution of property, and feminist theory. Based on his legendary Harvard course, Michael J. Sandel’s 2008 Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? introduces readers to the philosophical concepts that lurk beneath contemporary conflicts in politics and beyond. urn:lcp:introductiontopo0000wolf:epub:220c1759-d338-4b77-8aec-a4f51a54b03b Foldoutcount 0 Identifier introductiontopo0000wolf Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t24c55n39 Invoice 1652 Isbn 0192892517 Lccn 95038873 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9625 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-0000177 Openlibrary_edition The Graduate School exists to provide a stimulating and enriching environment for postgraduate students. Undergraduate certificates, diplomas and advanced diplomas. What are these types of courses? Flexible study

4. Republic, by Plato

An Introduction to Political Philosophy is a concise, lucid, and thought-provoking introduction to the most important questions of political philosophy, organised around the major issues. Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, whilst also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own. An Introduction to Political Philosophy Coherence Theory of Truth is accepted, it does not follow that all possible judgments constitute a logically related system of which the necessity could be apprehended by anyone with a sufficiently comprehensive experience. The only logical relationship which appears to relate many judgments is that of consistency, and if that is so it cannot be inferred that experience necessarily takes the form which it does take, or that the experience of different individuals must ultimately be harmonized in the Absolute. For other judgments might have been equally consistent with the rest of experience. It is only if the universe is first defined as that which has certain specified characteristics that it follows a priori that it must have these characteristics and could not conceivably have other characteristics. But this definition is an analytic proposition and does not imply that the universe must have the characteristics which it actually does have. For the above reasons it is very doubtful whether either Kant or Hegel was successful in refuting the essential principles of Hume's Empiricism; and many modern philosophers would agree with Hume that reason has only a hypothetical application to the real world. On this view it can never establish the truth of a belief, but can only demonstrate its logical implications; while in the sphere of conduct it can never justify the ends of action but can only devise the most effective means for attaining the ends determined by the irrational * passions1. The Implications of Empiricism If the foregoing conception of the nature and scope of reason is accepted, it follows that philosophy has a more limited scope than has been widely assumed in the past. Its function will be to discover the logical implications of beliefs, not to provide a rational justification of their truth. Their truth, whether defined in terms of coherence or correspondence, will never be rationally justified, and their logical implications will have neither more nor less truth than the beliefs themselves. Philosophy, in other words, will be concerned with meaning and not with truth. Truth will be the objective of science, and will be reached by generalization from experience, i.e. by discovering the general laws describing regularities of coexistence and sequence. Science will differ fundamentally from philosophy in that the formulation of these generalizations is not a rational process, and their application to experience has only a hypothetical validity. There is, for example, no rational justification for inferring that, because all examined samples of arsenic have proved to be poisonous, therefore all samples whatsoever must be poisonous; but if it is assumed that all samples whatsoever are poisonous, then it follows, as a logical implication, that any given sample must be poisonous. In short, if the Empiricist Theory is accepted, reason will apply only hypothetically to experience, and it will be impossible to provide a categorical demonstration of the truth of any proposition about what exists or what occurs. It will only be possible for reason to show what are the logical implications of such a proposition, i.e. to show what must exist or must occur on the assumption that X exists or occurs. But this latter assumption cannot The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” — so writes English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his monumental 1651 epic, Leviathan. Would a list of the most important works in political philosophy be complete without featuring the creator of one of the most influential political theories of all time? By a 'judgment' is here meant the 'assertion of a proposition'. The word thus serves to emphasize the active function of the mind upon which Kant and Hegel laid so much stress.

Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Online) | Oxford

But this goes in a slightly different direction as well. Not only is this study of the regime, as we’ve seen, as I’ve just tried to indicate, rooted in, in many ways, the practical experience of the thinkers we’ll be looking at; but the study of regime politics either implicitly or explicitly raises a question that goes beyond the boundary of any given society. A regime, as I’ve said, constitutes a people’s way of life, what they believe makes their life worth living, or to put it again slightly differently, what a people stand for. Although we are most familiar with the character of a modern democratic regime such as ours, the study of political philosophy is in many ways a kind of immersion into what we might call today comparative politics; that is to say it opens up to us the variety of regimes, each with its own distinctive set of claims or principles, each vying and potentially in conflict with all the others, okay? Underlying this cacophony of regimes is the question always, which of these regimes is best? What has or ought to have a claim on our loyalty and rational consent?An Introduction to Political Philosophy Hume's Empiricism Before the present century, when the doctrine has received wide support, the most celebrated exponent of Empiricism was the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), now generally recognized to have been one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Hume held that the only propositions which are certainly true are those which describe * relations of ideas', by which he meant analytic relationships in the sense defined above. Those which describe "matters of fact*, i.e. synthetic propositions, cannot be rationally justified, although they can be accepted as true in so far as they are justified by direct observation. But of course the great majority of synthetic propositions—in particular, the socalled 'laws' of science—go far beyond this and make assertions which cannot be justified by experience. Thus Hume argued that the belief in the universal truth of scientific laws follows repeated observations of the sequences which they describe; but he denied that there is any necessity in these sequences, or even in the occurrence of the belief that they are universal and necessary. If I infer that, because all observed samples of arsenic have proved to be poisonous, therefore all samples whatsoever are poisonous, no logical justification of this inference can, according to Hume, be given. It is just a fact that, following on the observation of numerous samples of arsenic which prove to be poisonous, everybody believes that all samples whatsoever will prove to be poisonous. But there is, according to Hume, no rational justification for this belief; it just happens to occur following on experience of the effects of arsenic in a limited number of instances, and just happens to have proved a reliable guide in practice. There is no guarantee that it will prove to be true of all instances whatsoever. Thus there is nothing * reasonable' in the belief in the a priori sense. Hume reached the same sceptical conclusions about the general propositions of morality. He thought it obvious that these propositions are synthetic, and argued that they cannot therefore be a priori Such propositions as * Jealousy is evil* or * Lying is wrong* are, he thought, obviously synthetic in that their predicates are not part of the meaning of the subjects. And such propositions cannot be a priori, for no necessary connection can, in his view, be discerned between the subject and the predicate. Hence the basis for these moral generalizations must be the same as the basis for the generalizations of natural science— the observation of a limited number of instances. And this is not a rational ground for asserting them. Having denied that moral generalizations have any logical necessity, Hume set himself to analyse the empirical evidence on which they are based. He reached the conclusion that the basis of such generalizations is a peculiar type of sentiment or feeling. When I say "Honesty is good* I am, according to Hume, saying, in a rather specific sense of the word 'like*, i Like honesty*. I am, in fact, describing not an inherent quality of honesty but a feeling excited in me by the contemplation of honesty. This feeling Hume called the 'pleasing sentiment of approbation*. He thought that moral disapproval in the same way expresses a sentiment of disapprobation. Thus Hume concluded that there is nothing "rational* or "logical* in morality and that it is impossible to show, on a priori grounds, that moral propositions are true or false. Their truth or falsity depends on the purely empirical question whether they are or are not accurate descriptions of the feelings to which they relate. While Wollstonecraft and others sowed the seeds for the ‘first wave’ of feminist philosophy and activism, French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex marks the starting point of second-wave feminism, whereby the aim is to achieve gender equality beyond voting rights. Turning from introductions and anthologies to primary texts, where better to start than with a discussion of political philosophy that, though over two thousand years old, is one of the subject’s finest works and still drives discussion today? Critique ofPure Reason, Second Edition, Introduction. The Problems of Philosophy, p. 129. Language, Truth, and Logic, Second Edition, p. 78.

Introduction to Political Philosophy | Open Yale Courses Introduction to Political Philosophy | Open Yale Courses

An Introduction to Political Philosophy The subordinate function which Hume attributed to reason may be briefly described as that of applying scientific generalizations. Of course these generalizations are. not * rational' in the a priori sense for they are synthetic propositions, and only analytic propositions are, in Hume's view, a priori. But on the assumption—which experience seems to justify1— that both physical and mental events occur in accordance with certain general laws, it is rational to look for these laws and to apply them with a view to predicting the future course of events. The process is rational in the strict sense in so far as it consists in drawing the logical implications of a hypothesis. If all arsenic is poisonous, it follows a priori that this piece of arsenic is poisonous, but neither the proposition that all arsenic is poisonous nor the proposition that this is a piece of arsenic is a priori Both of these propositions are empirical and cannot be rationally justified. The Rationalism of Kant and Hegel Hume's revolutionary account of the function of reason naturally evoked a reaction, and the philosophies of the great German thinkers Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) were attempts to restore to reason the positive functions which Hume had denied to it. Kant and Hegel sought to do this by stressing the active function of the mind in knowledge and, in particular, by arguing that, while synthetic propositions may by themselves be devoid of logical necessity, they are characterized by another kind of necessity (which Kant called 'transcendental necessity*) derived from the mind in which they originate. They are necessary, not in the logical sense that their falsity is inconceivable, but in the transcendental sense that experience could not take the form which it does take unless they were assumed to be universally true. Such, in brief, is Kant's theory of the nature of causal and moral laws. He admits that they are synthetic but claims that they are none the less a priori in the transcendental sense. His theory is idealist' in the sense that he holds the stuff of experience to be not independent objects but our ideas ofox judgments about objects. And while he believes that there are independent objects—which he calls 'things-in-themselves'—he holds that these are necessarily unknowable except in the form of appearances conditioned by the way in which the mind, in view of its structure, is bound to apprehend them. Many philosophers would question whether a theory of this sort constitutes any real answer to Hume's empiricism. They would question whether * transcendental' necessity is more than the empirical regularity admitted by Hume—whether, for example, the fact that we always interpret our experience in terms of causal regularities justifies the conclusion that we necessarily interpret it in this way. It must at least be admitted that Hume and other philosophers who think like him have not interpreted their experience in this way. And it is difficult to see why the almost universal belief in causal determination cannot be adequately described, as Hume described it, in terms of habit Publishers description: The Second Treatise is one of the most important political treatises ever written and one of the most far-reaching in its influence. Republic, 1,337 (translation by F.M.Comford). ibid., 1,346. A modern illustration of this principle is the fate of Hitler after his refusal to accept the settlement reached at the Munich Conference in October, 1938, and in ultimately losing all his power by placing no limit to his ambitions. Republic, I, 352.By using this service, you agree that you will only keep content for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services To participate in the course you will need to have regular access to the Internet and you will need to buy the following texts: From introductions and anthologies to grand political treatises from individual thinkers, this reading list is designed to provide you with a well-rounded view of the most important political contributions from philosophers down the ages. After reading Popper’s devastating critiques of each thinker, it is difficult to return to their political ideas with confidence. However, The Open Society and Its Enemies should not only be thought of as a successful negative work: Popper also posits one of the most profound conceptions and defences of democracy ever written, arguing that only if criticism is allowed to flourish in society can progress be made. This does not, of course, mean that experience can in practice ever provide a logically valid proof of the 'uniformity of Nature*, but only that experience never reveals anything which is inconsistent with the assumption of that principle.