Political Philosophy: How Should We Build A Society?
Meeting Time: Thursdays, 6:30-8:00
Class text: Course reader
Instructors: Rivka Maizlish, Megan Kennedy
Course description
What are the rights and duties of an individual living in a society? When, and how, do these rights and duties come into conflict? Is your course in life determined by your individual virtues, or by your societal position? In this course, we’ll read what writers from the 17th century to today have to say about these questions, with the aim of exploring and examining our own opinions. We’ll also see how issues of race, class, sexual identity and gender identity complicate and illuminate these questions.
Attendance
You’ve signed up for a full 9 weeks. We ask you to come to every class that you can make. If you can’t come, please follow the syllabus and ask somebody to fill you in on anything you missed. Please be aware that if you miss any two classes, your name will have to be removed from the roster, and you’ll have to wait until the next session starts up to join a class again.
Readings
You will be able to sign out class texts for the next 9 weeks. The readers are now the property of Oakhill Correctional Institution. They will be available to you for the 8 weeks of the class but will be collected after the session. No student not currently enrolled in the class should be in possession of the books or readings. Please treat them well; we want to make sure they last for others. If you end up being transferred or not completing the class for some reason, please return the materials to the School Office.
Class schedule
Note: come to class having read the materials listed underneath the class number.
Class #1 – Week of October 7
Introduction (why philosophy?), and an introduction to logical and rhetorical terms.
Class #2 – Week of October 14
John Locke, Second Treatise.
Class #3 – Week of October 21
John Stuart Mill, excerpts from On Liberty.
Class #4 – Week of October 28
Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto, Estranged Labor.
Emma Goldman: Anarchism: What It Really Stands For.
Class #5 – Week of November 4
Alasdair MacIntyre: excerpts from After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.
Allan Bloom: excerpts from The Closing of the American Mind.
Class #6 – Week of November 11
Excerpted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Veil of Ignorance.
Susan Moller Okin: introduction to Justice, Gender, and the Family
Class #7 – Week of November 18
W .E. B. Du Bois: Marxism and the Negro Problem.
Martin Luther King Jr.: Letter From A Birmingham Jail.
Class #8 – Week of November 25
Angela Davis: Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism.
Class #9 – Week of December 2
Naomi Murakawa: excerpt from The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.