Philosophy, revelation and politics: The recovery of medieval Islamic political philosophy

In contemporary philosophical thought, Leo Strauss is associated with the rediscovery of ancient political philosophy against modern political philosophy. The rediscovery of ancient political philosophy is the rediscovery of classical rationalism or “moderate Enlightenment” against modern rationalism or “radical Enlightenment” and can be understood as recapturing the “the question of man’s right life” and “the question of the right order of society”. This article would like to show that it was his study of medieval Islamic and Jewish texts that enabled Strauss to rediscover the classical rationalism. Also, in this article we would like to argue that although the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, Reason and Revelation embodies two irreconcilable alternatives or a way of life in his thought, this opposition should be only examined with references to claims about radical rationalism of modern philosophy. In this case, we would like to argue that there can be seen a commonality between these “opponents”, i.e., Athens and Jerusalem, Reason and Revelation in terms of both their attitudes towards morality and their approaches to the relationship between philosophy and society.

Cephalus, the Myth of Er, and Remaining Virtuous in Unvirtuous Times

Through a reading of the Myth of Er and Socrates' conversation with Cephalus, I will argue that merely conventional virtue is highly unstable and unreliable. Virtue acquired by convention proves foundationless outside the confines of the political regime that establishes those conventions, and a tendency toward an unreflective moral complacency on the part of the conventionally virtuous leaves them in particular danger of committing unjust actions. Socrates recommends the study of philosophy because it can ground conventionally acquired virtue and, even more importantly, because it is capable of shaking the moral complacency that afflicts the conventionally virtuous. Keywords: Republic, conventional virtue, Cephalus, Myth of Er, Ancient Political philosophy, relation between convention and philosophy

Greek and Roman Political Philosophy

In this bibliography “Greek and Roman political philosophy” is taken to mean philosophical reflection on politics in the Greco-Roman world from the 5th century bce to the 5th century ce. More particularly, ancient political philosophy involves reflection on the establishment of political institutions and laws; the nature of political rule; central social and political concepts such as liberty, justice, and equality; the rights and duties of citizenship and its relationship to a flourishing human life; civic education; and the different possible forms of constitutions or regimes. Scholars frequently distinguish political philosophy from political thought. Political thought encompasses any thinking about politics at all and may be expressed through a wide range of media and literary forms, from epistles to comedy to inscriptions. Political philosophy represents thinking about politics that is more specifically theoretical and systematic in nature. Thus, political philosophy may be seen as a subset of political thought. Because this bibliography is concerned with the narrower of the two categories, it focuses primarily on philosophers and theoretical discourse. This focus also informs the general organization of this entry, which adopts a chronological, author-by-author approach rather than the thematic approach sometimes utilized by historians of political thought. This bibliography covers Early Greek, Athenian, Hellenistic, Roman, and Early Christian political philosophy, extending from the Presocratics to St. Augustine.

Greek Political Theory

This article considers the theoretical perspective on the polis as the immediate context for an individual's flourishing. That ancient political philosophy has such strong roots in the Athens of Plato and Aristotle is no doubt part of the reason for the perpetuation of the polis as idea. The Cynics, and later, the Stoics, chafed against the artificial boundaries of the conventional polis; the Stoics in fact lived at a time when its political centrality was over. In championing the life of the ‘cosmic community’, what they call the ‘cosmopolis’, they from one perspective invite people to bring the ideals of the polis to bear on the universe as a whole. The number of Greeks for whom the polis was a lived reality was relatively small, then; but seen from this point of view, every Greek utopia was in the end a polis.

“Virtue, Obligation and Politics,” Revisited

Stephen Salkever in this Review (“Virtue, Obligation and Politics,” APSR 68 [March, 1974]) discusses two paradigms of politics: one based on the concept of virtue (ancient political philosophy), the other resting on obligation (modern political thought). We analyze the meaning and significance of these two paradigms in terms of the cognitive-developmental moral psychology common to Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. We first present the cognitive-developmental theory and its empirical findings. We then demonstrate that the politics of obligation falls within the virtue paradigm as a necessary stage in the development of virtue, which involves placing Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls within our developmental scheme. Finally, we explore the nature of understanding moral principles from within the cognitive-developmental perspective. In all this, we agree with Salkever's basic assumption that any account of political good (public as opposed to private) must be based on moral psychology, i.e., it must deal with the question of “What is good for the most inclusive of all publics, the human species?” We go two steps beyond Salkever, however, by showing the significance of the question, and by providing an answer to it (both of which bear upon the understanding of morality). An underlying purpose of our research is to present and to promote the political relevance and significance of moral psychology in general and cognitive development in particular.