PHIL 3750-011 (download syllabus doc)
Nita de Oliveira, Ph.D. - Office: Scott Hall 3012
Phone:
419-530-4517 - Office Hours: MF 8:30-11:00
Course Website: http://www.oocities.org/nythamar/politics.html
Personal Website: http://www.oocities.org/nythamar/nita.html
Register for this course at UT
Summer Course 2008: REL 1220-011 WORLD RELIGIONS
African-American Political Philosophy
Course Description:
PHIL 3750 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
[3 hours] A
study of classic and contemporary treatments of justice, authority, the
relations between individual and community, the meaning of freedom and equality,
power and violence, and race and gender. In this course we will be
exploring modern conceptions of the social contract, liberalism, libertarianism, republicanism, democracy, communitarianism,
socialism, feminism, postmodernism, and pluralism in the
writings of political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Martin Luther King, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Martha Nussbaum.
Required Text:
Political Philosophy: The Essential
Texts. Edited
by Steven M. Cahn.
Grading Policy:
Grades are based on point
accumulation throughout the semester. There are 2 Homeworks/Quizzes worth 15 points each and
1 Midterm worth 30 points. One of the Homeworks
might be replaced by a Class Presentation. NO LATE ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE
ACCEPTED, unless they are accompanied by evidence of a medical emergency (e.g.,
signed doctors note) or death in the family (e.g., funeral program). Make-up
exams will be given only to those students who inform me of their emergency by email
on the day of the exam. The cumulative final exam is worth 40 points, so as to
make up 100 points:
30
points = Homeworks/Quizzes
30
points = Midterm
40
points = Final Exam
100
total points
Final grades for the course
are based on the following scale:
93-100 pts.
= A 77-79 pts. = C+
90-92 pts.
= A- 73-76 pts. = C
87-89 pts.
= B+ 70-72 pts. = C-
83-86 pts.
= B 60-69 pts. = D
80-82 pts.
= B- 59 and below =
F
Academic Honesty:
Neither plagiarism (i.e., presenting
the written work of another as one's own) nor cheating (i.e., providing answers
to exam questions or receiving exam answers from another) will be tolerated.
Any academic dishonesty will be disciplined according to the guidelines in the
Accessibility:
If you need special
accommodations to attend my class, please notify me immediately. Your need for special
accommodations, including special testing requests, will need to be documented
by the Office of Accessibility, located at 1400 Snyder Memorial.
Make sure to prepare all the readings
before the date given. The reading assignments are usually short and hopefully
pleasant. Homework is turned in at the beginning of class on the day it is due.
There will be audiovisual presentations (DVD, online videos) and oral
presentations. The idea is that we should read and discuss together all the selections by the authors indicated on the syllabus. So, for the Hobbes reading, you should read the excerpts from his major work "Leviathan." Of course, the introduction to each author is always very helpful. And so forth.
As for the Homeworks # 1 and # 2, you are asked to either write a 1-2 page essay trying to address one question, problem or topic from one of the reading assignments, or you may write an in-class essay on the day the homework is due. For the essay, you can use the texts you read and the material available on the internet, but make sure you cite your sources properly.
Class Participation
Class participation is
essential. That includes class attendance (75%) as well as active involvement
in all phases of the class.
Class Schedule:
You Tube: Ethics of Freedom - anarchocapitalist (libertarian)
Week 1: May 12 Introduction: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Wikipedia entry on Political Philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Libertarianism
You Tube: Hobbes / Rousseau
You Tube: Ethical Egoism
You Tube: Judith Butler on Feminism
You Tube: Sartre's Existentialist Ethics
You Tube: Just War (Howard Zinn 1/3)
You Tube: Just War (Ron Paul)
May 13 Social Contract; Liberalism, Modern Democracy
May 14 Thomas Hobbes /Leviathan
May 15 John Locke / Second Treatise
You Tube: The Obsolete Man (1/3)
Week 2: May 19 Republicanism, freedom and equality
You Tube: THX 1138
You Tube: Global Political Freedom
You Tube: Milton Friedman on Freedom
May 20 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau / Social Contract
You Tube: The French Revolution
May 21 Immanuel Kant
You Tube: Kant's Ethics
You Tube: Free Will (Waking Life)
May 22 Abraham Lincoln
You Tube: History Project on Lincoln
You Tube: The Greatness of Abraham Lincoln
You Tube: Lincoln Institute: The Pressure for Emancipation
You Tube: The Gettysburg Address
K. Marx's Letter to Pres. Lincoln
The New Yorker: The Fall of Conservatism
Week 3: May 26 No Class (Memorial Day)
May 27 - Homework # 1 (15 points) / Communitarianism, socialism, communism
You Tube: Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx
Hegel (in German)
Hegel in a nutshell
May 28 - Georg Hegel
Hegel's Hyper Text
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
May 29 - Karl Marx
Marx Internet Archives
You Tube: Communist Manifesto
You Tube: Marxism
You Tube: Marxism in 21st Cent.
Week 4: June 2 Power and violence
Wiki on Political Power
Wiki on Violence
On Walter Benjamin's Critique of Violence, Power, and Terrorism
You Tube: Power and Violence
"The Great Debaters"
June 3 Martin Luther King
Wiki entry on MLK
You Tube: Martin Luther King "From Birmingham to D.C." (1/2)
You Tube: 1963 BOMBINGS IN BIRMINGHAM, AL.
You Tube: Martin Luther King - Birmingham Jail
You Tube: Martin Luther King - Birmingham Speech
You Tube: Martin Luther King's "American Dream"
June 4 Michel Foucault
Foucault's Genealogy of Modernity
The James Randi Educational Foundation
YouTube: Justice vs. Power - Chomsky vs. Foucault
June 5 Class Presentations / Discussion: Power and Justice
Week 5: June 9 Justice, Deliberative Democracy, Pluralism
June 10 John Rawls
You Tube: Lecture on Rawls's Distributive Justice
You Tube: Habermas on The Kantian Project of Cosmopolitan Law
June 11 Jόrgen Habermas
You Tube: Habermas interview
Power Point: Rawls
June 12 Homework # 2 (15 points)
Week 6: June 16 - Midterm (30 points): Just War, Politics and Religion
Exhaustive Website on Just War Theories
Wikipedia on Just War Theories
Wiki on "Clash of Civilizations"
Wiki on Secularization
YouTube / Charlie Rose: Michael Walzer et al. on the Iraq War (2002)
YouTube: Chomsky on the Clash of Civilizations
YouTube: An Alternative Arabic view of the Clash of Civilizations
Islam and Secularization
Peace Now / Shalom Achshav
YouTube: Stop the Clash of Civilizations
June 17 Feminism & Postmodernism: Martha Nussbaum / Final Review
Wikipedia entry on Feminism
Wikipedia entry on Postmodernism
You Tube: Martha Nussbaum Interview
You Tube: Feminist Critique of Human Rights
YouTube on Po-Mo: David Lynch
June 18 Final Exam (40 points)
June 19 Make-ups
About the Textbook: Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts.
Ideal for survey
courses in social and political philosophy, this volume is a substantially
abridged and slightly altered version of Steven M. Cahn's Classics of Political and Moral Philosophy (Oxford
University Press, 2001). Offering coverage from antiquity to the present, Political Philosophy: The
Essential Texts is a historically organized collection of the most
significant works from nearly 2,500 years of political philosophy. It moves
from classical thought (Plato, Aristotle) through the medieval period (Aquinas)
to modern perspectives (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith,
Hamilton and Madison, Kant). The book includes work from major
nineteenth-century thinkers (Hegel, Marx and Engels, Mill) and
twentieth-century theorists (Rawls, Nozick, Foucault,
Habermas, Nussbaum) and also presents a variety of
notable documents and addresses, including the Declaration of Independence, the
Bill of Rights, and speeches by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. The readings are
substantial or complete texts, not fragments. An especially valuable feature of
this volume is that the works of each author are introduced with an engaging
essay by a leading contemporary authority. These introductions include Richard
Kraut on Plato and Aristotle; Paul J. Weithman on
Aquinas; Roger D. Masters on Machiavelli; Jean Hampton on Hobbes; A. John
Simmons on Locke; Joshua Cohen on Rousseau and Rawls; Donald W. Livingston on
Hume; Charles L. Griswold, Jr., on Adam Smith; Bernard E. Brown on Hamilton and
Madison; Paul Guyer on Kant; Steven B. Smith on
Hegel; Richard Miller on Marx and Engels; Jeremy Waldron on Mill; Thomas Christiano on Nozick; Thomas A.
McCarthy on Foucault and Habermas; and Eva Feder Kittay on Nussbaum.
Modern Political Philosophy:
The social contract: a hypothetical procedure (thought-experiment) to morally justify the legitimacy of government and juridical, political institutions. The idea is that legitimate state authority must be derived from the consent of the governed.
Thomas Hobbes: absolutist version of the social contract
state of nature - social contract - "commonwealth" (civil society)
In order to leave the state of nature (war of all against all, fear of violent death) humans must transfer their rights to an absolute sovereign (esp. monarch) in order to enjoy the benefits of a peaceful co-existence under the rule of law (juridical procedures and political institutions that regulate the duties and rights of all citizens).
The idea is that humans give up their natural rights (rights to all things, esp. self-preservation) for the sake of protection, safety, and mutual recognition. Hence the idea of political obligation, as opposed to anarchy: one must pay taxes and comply with the law, as one recognizes the legitimacy of government.
John Locke: a liberal-democratic version of the social contract
For Locke, the main purpose of the social contract is the preservation of the property of all the members of that society, by securing the individuals' natural rights to life, liberty, and property.
Political authority must be, therefore, limited to the public sphere and cannot intervene in private matters, where individuals are free to pursue their self-interests and moral conceptions of happiness. Society must be thus distinguished from government, which can be resisted by civil disobedience.
Classical liberalism (J.S. Mill): individual liberties and rights must be extended to all persons in civil society. Hence, slavery is morally wrong, just as women's suffrage and the rights of workers must be also recognized by any legitimate government. All areas of the public sphere of action must be covered by the principle of liberty.
Communism (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels): seeks to promote the establishment of a classless society based on the common ownership of the means of production.
According to Marxism, capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers by the owners of capital (the bourgeois or the ruling elites). In order to overcome this continual exploitation of oppressed workers by dominating oppressors, a proletarian revolution is in order so as to overturn the historical processes of class struggles.
All previous societies have been caught up in the history of class struggles.
The proletariat comprises all the lower strata of the middle class (tradespeople, shopkeepers, handicraftsmen, peasants) who sink gradually into a class of workers whose stranged, alienated labor is reduced to the means to sustain the physical existence of the laborer and is also the source of profit for the owner of the means of production (capital). Hence the proletarian condition of exploitation and alienation.
According to John Rawls, we must rescue the egalitarian dimension (i.e. the principle of equality) of democracy by means of a theory of justice that generalizes and carries to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract.
In order to assign rights and duties for all citizens in a just society, Rawls postulates an original position, where the parties, from behind a veil of ignorance, choose the principles of justice to distribute the social primary goods for a well-ordered society, in which public criteria for judging the feasible, basic structure of society would be publicly recognized and accepted by all.
By this thought-experiment, Rawls believes that our concrete, actual conceptions and institutions can be calibrated through reflective equilibrium towards a more just, egalitarian society (well-ordered society), as we continually try to apply the two principles of justice to our social, economic and political institutions:
First: Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. (Equal Liberty Principle)
Second: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that : a) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of Fair Equality of Opportunity; b) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (Difference Principle).
Justice as fairness = equal liberty > fair equality of opportunity > inequalities acceptable by less favored
Foucault-Chomsky on Human Nature and Justice: Contextualism vs. Universalism
The Habermas-Foucault Debate: Modernity vs. Post-Modernity
In-Class Discussion on Freedom of Choice and Responsibility
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