ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
Marcus Tullius Cicero expressed principles that became the bedrock of liberty in the modern world. He insisted on the primacy of moral standards over government laws. These standards became known as natural law. Above all, Cicero declared, the government is morally obliged to protect human life and private property. When the government runs amok, people …
Aristotle was simply too versatile of a scholar for us to go into all of his theories right now, so we’re just going to focus on one main area: politics. Aristotle wrote a lot about politics and ethics because to him, politics and ethics were inseparable. So, before we can talk about politics, we need …
THOUGH PLATO WAS THE FIRST to elaborate a Socratic philosophy of politics, his student Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE) was the first to articulate a practically-oriented political science, meant to be of use to legislators, statesmen, and citizens. Like his teachers, Aristotle did much to promote philosophy as an ally to the city and a guide …
Plato’s Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the …
Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.E.) developed such distinct areas of philosophy as epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. His deep influence on Western philosophy is asserted in the famous remark of Alfred North Whitehead: “the safest characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” He was also the prototypical …
THE PROPER PLACE of speech or reason, in the political community became for the first time a pressing theoretical question and political issue with the life and death of Socrates. Socrates departed from the tradition of philosophy that preceded him by, among other things, his decision to investigate moral and political questions by questioning publicly and …
Socrates’ (469- 399 BCE) political views, as represented in Plato‘s dialogue “The Republic”, were strongly against the democracy that had so recently been restored in the Athens of his day, and indeed against any form of government that did not conform to his ideal of a perfect republic led by philosophers, who he claimed was the only type of person suitable to govern others. He believed …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and because of his influence on later thinkers. Rousseau’s own view of philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing philosophers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, …
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) developed a philosophy based on freedom within a wider philosophical system offering novel views on topics ranging from property and punishment to morality and the state. Hegel’s main work was the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (“PR”) first published in 1821. Many of his other major works include discussions or analyses …
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth-century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant’s “critical philosophy” – especially in …