Topics in Political Philosophy
This course will concentrate on a specific issue or issues in political philosophy. Typical topics include civil disobedience, war and peace, political revolution, punishment, and criminal justice.
Outcomes: Students will be able to understand and articulate a deeper awareness of philosophical problems and answers to questions regarding the selected topic.
Democracy in Theory and Practice
This course will concentrate on a specific issue or issues in political philosophy. Typical topics include civil disobedience, war and peace, political revolution, punishment, and criminal justice.
Outcomes: Students will be able to understand and articulate a deeper awareness of philosophical problems and answers to questions regarding the selected topic.
Our class will focus on a topic that is on everyone¿s mind these days: the crisis of democracy. This crisis reflects existential challenges, technological changes in mass communication, demographic shifts, and populist transformations of political parties.
We begin by examining foundational philosophers of democracy (Rousseau and Madison) and then turn our attention to specific themes that circle around our contemporary democratic crisis: the role of constitutional legal order, uncivil protest, and civil disobedience in democratic life; the tension between religion/ideology and democratic constitutional civility; the arguments for and against securing visual representation of minorities and women in legislative bodies; the negative and positive relationship between global capitalism and democracy. Among the topics we will address are: coups, populism, states of emergency as grounds for authoritarian rule, transformations in communication and the political public sphere, epistocratic and technocratic alternatives to democracy, and the extension of democracy to the workplace.
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