Phil 1004W Introduction to Political Philosophy
Instructor Christopher Moore
SS I 06/11/07-07/08/07 4 cr
001 LET 11:45am-02:15pm MTWThF
(Meets CLE req of Citizenship/Publ Ethics Theme, Other Humanities, Writing Intensive)
Political philosophy studies the tension between our human need (i) to live socially, in families, cities, and larger communities, and (ii) to live as individuals, free from oppression and manipulation from our political leaders and neighbors. We thrive only with the care, ingenuity, and work of others; but we thrive, too, only by developing our personal abilities and taking responsibility for finding our respective callings.
This course focuses on a complex way in which our social existence shapes our personal life. Our respective personalities and characters (hopes, commitments, skills, aversions) depend not simply on our willing them to exist, or on irreversible genetics. The external environment in which we grow and to which we open our senses--our family, TV, peers, the news, books we read, the streets we walk on, the products and packaging at the mall, teachers, popular music--interacts with and reacts to whatever is already "inside" us and becomes largely responsible for making us who we are. To explain why people smoke cigarettes, want to have fancy weddings, frown at the destitute, want success in business, hate their personal appearance, and devote themselves to their siblings, we look to the social, economic, political, and legal environments in which they develop.
The authors we read in this course write about how our psychological anxieties are unavoidably formed by and recapitulate society's excesses, injustices, inequalities, and its powers, energies, and discoveries. Rousseau surprises the French by arguing that "civilization" or "cultural advancement" does not make for a happy, more contended, populace. Wollstonecraft shows that women's apparent weaknesses and immoralities originate in society's refusal to provide half the species an education equal to that given to men. Marx shows wage-labor, money, and contract laws to be social practices, not "natural phenomena," ones advantageous to a few and harmful to others, the latter of whom become alienated (estranged) from their own human capacities. Freud applies psychoanalytic principles to show how individuals absorb, then repress, defective aspects of their milieu. Jane Jacobs, in a refreshingly journalistic work, explains how the diversity of social engagements for which city-life is cherished is neither accidental nor inevitable. Martha Nussbaum describes the process of "adaptive preference" (lessening yourself, squelching your hopes, to fit in with one's hostile surroundings). Auxiliary reading will provide context. |
Phil 3001W General History of Western Philosophy: Ancient Period
Professor Joseph Owens
SS I 06/11/07-07/08/07 4 cr
001 LET 11:45-02:55 MTWTh
(Meets CLE req of Other Humanities Core, Writing Intensive)
In this course we will study the efforts of the Greek Philosophers to understand themselves and their universe (physical and social), efforts which originated in the seemingly strange speculations of the Presocratics and culminated in the monumental works of Plato and Artistotle, We will focus on metaphysical and epistemological issues, possibility and nature of genuine knowledge, etc. |
