FA18 new course: PHIL690: Political Philosophy

This coming FA18, the Department of Philosophy is offering a new special topics seminar: PHIL690: Political Philosophy.

This seminar is being taught by Professor Steve Bilakovics, and will meet on Tuesdays at 5:30pm–8:15pm in LA2–108. Don’t miss out! This course will be an outstanding (and timely!) opportunity for serious study of the very foundations of political thought, and relevant to a variety of disciplines beyond Philosophy.

Course Description:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In these few words, the Declaration of Independence (1776) lays out the whole of modern Western political philosophy: the foundational belief in equality; the individual freedoms, or rights, that follow from equality; the origin and purpose of government, along with the source of its legitimacy. It offers a vision of a just social and political order.

This course explores the principles, practices, and paradoxes of liberal democratic self-government, as expressed in the Declaration. To do so, we’ll step outside of our often unnoticed philosophical presuppositions regarding freedom and equality and justice by looking at alternative visions both ancient (Plato and Aristotle) and modern (Rousseau and Marx). In the foreign views they provide, we’ll encounter very different ideas of politics, society, ethics, and even human nature.

Through the course, by way of a broad introduction to a range of core texts and traditions of political philosophy, we’ll develop the ability to understand and critique our own time in deeper ways and from broader perspectives.

Readings:
Plato, The Republic
Aristotle, Politics
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
John Locke, Two Treatise of Government
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
    *Additional readings will be distributed via e-mail.