ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
Despite his egoism and individualism, Spencer held that life in the community was important. Because the relation of parts to one another was one of mutual dependency, and because of the priority of the individual ‘part’ to the collective, society could not do or be anything other than the sum of its units. This view …
In much the same way that Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made significant contributions to a wide variety of areas, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political theory. His …
Since Man has mastered speech, the meta question has been asked: what is philosophy, in general, and political philosophy, in particular? The question of its function follows. Ancient and modern philosophers have devoted a substantial part of their life to an attempt to answer the meta question. Their theoretical framework, i.e. their approaches, have diverged widely. How …
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) profoundly influenced the shape of nineteenth-century British thought and political discourse. His substantial corpus of works includes texts in logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, religion, and current affairs. Among his most well-known and significant is A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, The Subjection of Women, Three Essays on …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, was the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. In this work, Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts …
Starting in the 1600s, European philosophers began debating the question of who should govern a nation. As the absolute rule of kings weakened, Enlightenment philosophers argued for different forms of democracy. In 1649, a civil war broke out over who would rule England—Parliament or King Charles I. The war ended with the beheading of the …
In political theory, Hume has both theoretical discussions on the origins of government and more informal essays on popular political controversies of his day. In his theoretical discussions, he attacks two basic notions in eighteenth-century political philosophy: the social contract and the instinctive nature of justice regarding private property. In his 1748 essay “Of the Original …
In the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume (1711–1776) describes the intellectual scene before him as a “noise and clamor” in which every trivial question was debated, but nothing important was ever settled. Hence arose “a common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds, even among those, who profess themselves, scholars.” Thinkers such …
John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to …
Locke proposed a radical conception of political philosophy deduced from the principle of self-ownership and the corollary right to own property, which in turn is based on his famous claim that a man earns ownership over a resource when he mixes his labor with it. Government, he argued, should be limited to securing the life …