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Sep 22, 2025
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PSCN 205 - Introduction to Political Philosophy
3 Credit(s)
Students undertake a survey of key writings in the ancient, medieval, and modern bibliographies. Course readings are selected from the works of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Hayek, and Rawls. Readings are selected for their potential to produce enlightened answers to the normative question “How ought persons to live together?” Course readings and discussions are especially useful to students seeking familiarity with basic principles of formal logic. Most classroom sessions are highly interactive and follow a seminar format.
Course Frequency: ALT F
Grading Method: Student option.
Learning Outcomes:
- Students will distinguish the essential normative questions underlying the work of ancient political philosophers from the essential normative questions addressed by modern and contemporary political philosophers.
- Students will discuss the impact of the Enlightenment on the decline of a “politics of the good” and the emergence of the rights-based politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
- Students will distinguish major contemporary theories of the legitimacy of the state and the morally acceptable reach of government power.
- Students will distinguish competing views of human freedom and their compatibility with theories of the state.
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