| Assignments | Paper 1 :: Paper 2 :: Paper 3 :: Exam Preview |
|---|---|
| Class picture | What it looks like to know this much. |
| Contact | How to get in touch with Michael Green. |
| Grades | Qualitative and quantitative explanations of what grades mean. |
| Notes | My perspective on each session. |
| Sakai | Use Sakai for announcements, due dates, the roster, and e-reserve readings. |
| Syllabus | The plan for each session in glorious PDF. |
| Writing | My advice about philosophy papers. Worth every penny it costs to click. |
Political philosophy is about the nature of the state. It tries to answer questions such as these. “Should we have a state at all?” “What is a just state or society like?” “What powers does the state have?” “Should individuals obey the state?”
The best way to get a sense of what the course will be like is to look at the website for last year’s course. It includes a syllabus and notes for most of the class sessions. This year’s course will be pretty much the same, except I do not plan on reading Aristotle’s Politics this year. I would like to work in some Rousseau, but I’m not sure if I can do so.
If you’re keen to get ahead on the reading, I ordered the following books: Plato’s Republic (Hackett, second edition, translated by Grube and Reeve); Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (Hackett, edited by Curley); John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (Hackett, edited by MacPherson); John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (Hackett, edited by Rapaport), and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press, original edition, not the revised one).
It’s easiest to have these editions because we will often discuss specific passages in class and it can be a real pain to find them without being able to rely on page numbers. The Hackett editions are all very good and quite inexpensive.
