Monday, May 4, 2009

NO CLASS TODAY - READ BELOW

Please answer the following questions on the blog: In your own words, describe the moral dimensions of the anthropocentric/eccocentric discussion. Does the existential perspective of radical freedom and responsibility relate to the environment? How does Dr. Snauwaert's discussion fit into the general philosophical questions/issues about "the good", knowledge, truth, and freedom. This must be posted by 7pm for credit.

For today's topic presenters - send your presentations to me today- and you will have about five minutes to present today...

Next class we will discuss this in detail - we will also discuss the final- I will be posting all of the lectures and class presentations online within the next few days...

The following are the themes of questions on the final exam- come to class with your questions for the exams.

Best,

Dave Ragland


Plato
what is the purpose of musical training
role of the guardians
most important virtue of the state
meaning of the cave allegory
theory of forms
where ethics lie

Aristotle
Golden Mean
how do we become ethical
what is the ultimate aim of all human action
difference between Plato and Aristotle in ethics

Aquinas,
How does he view ethics
what does he do with Aristotle's ethical positions
what is the final end

Descartes
why is he reflecting?
why is there an evil deceiver?
what is his argument for the existence of God?
why is Descartes so important to history and philosophy?

Kant
When is there morality?
what is a categorical imperative?
What is the chief framework of his argument for peace?
what is the secret guarantee for peace?
End/means?

Dosteyeveky
what is the meaning of the story and the basic outline?

Sartre
what is radical freedom?
what is existentialism?
how does it affect human relationships?
the environment?

Snauwaert
Anthropocentric/ecocentric debate

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Assignment for the Grand Inquistor

Hey Guys,

Since there is so much reading-

1) Finish the reading and answer the following questions on the blog, while engaging others who post on the blog. This will be due by Monday Morning at 8am.

Question: Based on the reading - Is religion needed to be moral? According to the narrator most people need religion as a guideline. Is the the grand inquistor moral? His intentions seems to be in the best interests of humans- being that we are motivated by fear of hell and awesome power- Does Jesus prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is God? How- (you can also use the new testament in your argument)

What are the problems with the grand inquisitors argument? Be specific, spell the the point- make references, use quotes and interact with your fellow class mates thoughts- do not borrow others thoughts from the internet without giving them credit and sharing what you think about it- beyond- I agree, or disagree- think about this...

A movie that is helpful is "Jésus de Montréal" or Jesus of Montreal... rent it watch it- let me know...

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Reading for Next Monday- Questions for the Inquistor coming shortly

Karl Marx ON HE JEWISH QUESTION

written Autumn 1843,published February, 1844

_

The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the state in

which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political state, no

state as such, the Jewish question is a purely _theological_ one. The

Jew finds himself in _religious_ opposition to the state, which

recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex

professo. Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged

criticism -- criticism of Christian theology and of Jewish theology.

Hence, we continue to operate in the sphere of theology, however much we

may operate critically within it.



In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question is a question of

constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness of political

emancipation. Since the semblance of a state religion is retained here,

although in a meaningless and self-contradictory formula, that of a

religion of the majority, the relation of the Jew to the state retains

the semblance of a religious, theological opposition.



Only in the North American states -- at least, in some of them -- does

the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a

really _secular_ question. Only where the political state exists in its

completely developed form can the relation of the Jew, and of the

religious man in general, to the political state, and therefore the

relation of religion to the state, show itself in its specific

character, in its purity. The criticism of this relation ceases to be

theological criticism as soon as the state ceases to adopt a theological

attitude toward religion, as soon as it behaves towards religion as a

state -- i.e., politically.



.. Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from

the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is o longer

the spirit of the state, in which man behaves -- although in a limited

way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere -- as a

species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the

spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium

contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence

of difference. It has become the expression of man's separation from

his community, from himself and from other men -- as it was originally.

It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy,

and arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North

America, for example, gives it even externally the form of a purely

individual affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private

interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be

under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The

division of the human being into a _public_ man and a _private_ man, the

displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not

a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation,

therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives

to do so.



We have, thus, shown that political emancipation from religion leaves

religion in existence, although not a privileged religion. The

contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion finds

himself involved in relation to his citizenship is only _one aspect_ of

the universal secular contradiction between the political state and civil

society. The consummation of the Christian state is the state which

acknowledges itself as a state and disregards the religion of its

members. The emancipation of the state from religion is not the

emancipation of the real man from religion.

Therefore, we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannot be

emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically from

Judaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can be emancipated

politically without renouncing Judaism completely and incontrovertibly,

political emancipation itself is not _human_ emancipation



The droits de l'homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct from

the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is homme as

distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of civil society. Why

is the member of civil society called "man", simply man; why are his

rights called the rights of man? How is this fact to be explained? From

the relationship between the political state and civil society, from the

nature of political emancipation..



Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man, the droits

de l'homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen, are nothing but the

rights of a member of civil society -- i.e., the rights of egoistic man,

of man separated from other men and from the community. Let us hear

what the most radical Constitution, the Constitution of 1793, has to

say:



Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.



Article 2. "These rights, etc., (the natural and imprescriptible

rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property."



What constitutes liberty?



Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything

that does not harm the rights of others",



or, according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791:



"Liberty consists in being able to do everything which does not

harm others."



Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one

else. The limits within which anyone can act _without harming_ someone

else are defined by law, just as the boundary between two fields is

determined by a boundary post. It is a question of the liberty of man

as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.



None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man,

beyond man as a member of civil society -- that is, an individual

withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and

private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of

man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary,

species-like itself, society, appears as a framework external to the

individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. The sole

bound holding them together it natural necessity, need and private

interest, the preservation of their property and their egoistic selves.



.. Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.

He was not fred from property, he received freedom to own property. He

was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage

in business.



Therefore, Rousseau (in the Social Contract) correctly described the abstract idea of political

man as follows:



"Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions must

feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of

transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and

solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a

sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of

substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and

independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and

give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without

the help of other men."



_All_ emancipation is a _reduction_ of the human world and relationships

to _man himself_.



Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a

member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on

the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.



Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract

citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in

his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular

situation, only when man has recognized and organized his "own powers"

as -social_ powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power

from himself in the shape of _political_ power, only then will human

emancipation have been accomplished.



Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer

does, but the everyday Jew.



Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us

look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.



What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest.



What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his

worldly God? Money.



Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently

from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our

time.



An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for

huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make

the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated

like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand,

if the Jew recognizes that this _practical_ nature of his is futile and

works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development

and works for _human emancipation_ as such and turns against the supreme

practical expression of human self-estrangement.



We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the

_present time_, an element which through historical development -- to

which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed -- has

been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily

begin to disintegrate.



In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation

of mankind from Judaism.



The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way.



"The Jew, who in Vienna, for example, is only tolerated, determines

the fate of the whole Empire by his financial power. The Jew, who

may have no rights in the smallest German state, decides the fate

of Europe. While corporations and guilds refuse to admit Jews, or

have not yet adopted a favorable attitude towards them, the

audacity of industry mocks at the obstinacy of the material

institutions." (Bruno Bauer, _The Jewish Question_, p.114)



This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish

manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also

because, through him and also apart from him, _money_ has become a world

power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of

the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as

the Christians have become Jews.



Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the

Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression

that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have

become articles of trade, and the bankrupt trader deals in the Gospel

just as the Gospel preacher who has become rich goes in for business

deals.



What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need,

egoism.



The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of

the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of

divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society,

and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully

given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and

self-interest is money.



Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may

exist. Money degrades all the gods of man -- and turns them into

commodities. Money is the universal self-established _value_ of all

things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world -- both the world of

men and nature -- of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence

of man's work and man's existence, and this alien essence dominates him,

and he worships it.



The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the

world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is

only an illusory bill of exchange.

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself,

which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the

real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The

species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc.,

becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.



The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of of the

merchant, of the man of money in general.



Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of

Judaism -- huckstering and its preconditions -- the Jew will have become

impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because

the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, nd

because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his

species-existence has been abolished.



The _social_ emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from

Judaism.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Update

4/20 - Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, question of God

4/22, 4/28 –Karl Marx Readings are from three places-
1. Overview - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1
2. Alienation of Labor - http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/MODERN/ALIEN.HTM
3. On the Jewish Question - http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish- question/index.htm

4/30 - Jean Paul Sartre – Existentialism and Radical Freedom

5/4 - Dale Snauwaert - Environmental Ethics**, the earth charter*

5/6 - Review of exam,

5/13 – 3:30pm – 6:15 Final Exam

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Update- Revised Schedule

4/1, Descartes

4/6, 4/8 - Immanuel Kant, Duty and Reason & Towards Perpetual Peace

4/15 - Mary Wollstonecraft – Vindication of the Rights of a Woman

4/20 - Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, question of God

4/22, 4/28 –Karl Marx

4/30 - Jean Paul Sartre – Existentialism and Radical Freedom

5/4 - Dale Snauwaert - Environmental Ethics**, the earth charter*

5/6 - Review of exam,

5/13 – 3:30pm – 6:15 Final Exam


Presentations are part of your grade so if you have not present- do not forget-

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Power Points...

Hey Guys

Here are the powerpoints of Plato and Aristotle... Please make comments if there are questions... about the ppt's

Plato's Republic




Aristotle/Plato ppt

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Question for discussion

Hey Guys,

Be on the look out for additional questions for your midterm papers. I will be emailing them shortly. Please answer the following questions. Feel free to respond to your classmates responses also.

How does Aristotle's concept of excess and defect relate to morality?

Is moderation a compelling model of the ethical life? how so?


Are ethics innate or does experience provide a more valid perspective?