Autumn Term - Thursdays 10.30am - 12.30pm
2008
September 18, 25
October 2, 16, 23, 30
November 6, 13, 20, 27
Spring Term - Thursdays 10.30am - 12.30pm
2009
January 15, 22, 29
February 5, 12, 19, 26
March 5, 12, 19
Summer Term - Thursdays 10.30am - 12.30pm
2009
April 30
May 7, 14, 21, 28
June 4, 11, 18, 25
Jul 2
Plato believed that a just world could only be achieved either when rulers were philosophers or philosophers were rulers. Can there ever have been a time that had greater need of government by real philosophical understanding and moral clarity than ours?
The thinking of the past offers two things. First, ideas, standards and analytic tools that we can study, judge, accept or reject - but always use as standards against which to measure our own concepts and actions. Second, ways of thinking and talking about the fundamental problems of society and human behaviour.
The title of these seminars links two distinct but essentially related areas. To deal with the political without referring to the world of moral and ethical thought is to reduce it to a mere study of organisation, realpolitik and compromise. To study the moral without the context of the real world in which we live, is to run the risk of mere abstraction or high-minded irrelevance. But the two together, the political with the moral, provide the most significant way of allowing us test our studies against both necessity and the ideal.
Of course we read Plato or Hegel for their original ideas - but much more for the way in which studying them teaches us to think for ourselves - about good and bad, right and wrong, power and responsibility, rights and obligations. In other words, there are two ways of studying the great philosophers: historically, to understand what they were saying; and as a way of enabling us to think about our own world. We shall be doing both.
In these seminars we will study major texts by many of the great moral and political philosophers, starting with Plato and coming down to our century. This is no mean task and will take time, so that the seminars will be a careful balance to allow both full discussion and a good rate of progress. The journey could not be more exciting, rewarding - or real, as we do battle with the most essential ideas of the past and our own present.
The main philosophers and texts that we will study are listed below. We will be using an anthology with supplementary material provided as required. The list perhaps looks daunting, but all these works were written for concerned men and women to read, and with guidance, are both accessible and exciting. To have read from and studied these great works is to have entered into the real heart of philosophical engagement with the world. What we are about to do is profound, enormously stimulating and important.
Plato
The Republic, Crito
Aristotle
Politics, Nicomachean Ethics
Cicero
On the republic, On the laws, On the good life
Machiavelli
The Prince
Hobbes
Leviathan
Spinoza
Theologico-Political treatise
Locke
Second Treatise of Government
Letter concerning toleration
Rousseau
Of the Social contract
The origin of inequality
Hume
A treatise of human nature
Of the original contract
Smith
The wealth of nations
Bentham
Principles of legislation
Kant
Perpetual peace; Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals
Hegel
Philosophy of right
Marx
The German ideology; Manifesto of the Communist Party
Mill
On Liberty, Utilitarianism, On the subjugation of women
Nietzsche
Beyond good and evil, On the genealogy of morals
Popper
The open society and its enemies
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