Unit-1 Conventional Understanding Of The Political (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Pre-Political and the Political in Aristotle's 'Politics'. In: Problemos, 2014 (85): 18-29.
The Pre-Political and the Political in Aristotle's 'Politics', 2014
[This paper is based on BA course project (2012) written under supervision of prof. Naglis Kardelis at Vilnius University.] The paper argues that the distinction between the pre-political and the political in the form of the household and the state is essential to the understanding of Aristotle’s communal projects. The analysis with the help of this distinction reveals the structure and principles of Aristotelian communal projects and removes tensions, which are rooted in different and frequently incompatible statements of Aristotle. In the course of the paper, it is showed that the household and the state can be defined as separate and yet interdependent communities and how these definitions affect the understanding of concrete constitutional communities.
«Politics» and «The Political»: The Mythical Superposition of Two Political States
Philosophy International Journal, 2020
The distinction between «politics» and «the political» has been placed historically within a political narrative which is often overlooked by political science and political philosophy. This narrative pertains to the realm of myth, and, because of this, a clear interpretation of such narrative is still missing. The reason for this is that the relationship between myth and politics is often perceived as dangerous, and closer to totalitarian rather than democratic governments. These two concepts have been understood as different stages in the description of public affaires: first as a stage of emergence, and then as a stage of institutionalization. But by looking at myth as the ground from which political actions and institutions spring, the distinction between politics and the political can be understood in terms, not of stages, but of super positions. Reality collapses into either one of these superposed states with the intervention of a spectator. In this sense, public events no longer need to be seen as manifestations of politics that will eventually, and inevitably, become part of the political.
Ancient and Medieval Political Theory (doctoral-level syllabus)
This course introduces some of the most influential texts and themes in Western political thought, from the ancient Greeks through Aquinas. We examine questions like: What is the good life? What is justice? What are the advantages of and problems with democracy? What is the best political regime? This course does not merely aim to impart historical information, but to prompt critical engagement with some of the central texts of the Western philosophical tradition. Students are therefore expected to explore and develop their own considered responses to the ideas and arguments encountered in the readings.
Philosophica Critica, 2018
The purpose of this article is to investigate one of the most interesting and debated issues within the philosophical dis-cussion about politics: the metaphor of the body politic and its relation with the theory of sovereignty in contemporary political theory. After an opening section, which proposes a brief sketch about the origin of the body politic within phi-losophy (especially in Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions), the article provides a theoretical insight of such a theory, by dealing with three of its definitions: Kantorowicz’s “king’s two bodies”; Hobbes’ Leviathan and Schmitt’s theory of sove-reignty. The article aims at presenting some arguments to define these three perspectives, by examining – in the last section – how this paradigm has evolved into the more complex and articulated theory of the rule of law in contemporary de-mocratic societies.
The emergence of the polis as the prominent form of socio-political life is one of the most important developments of archaic and classical Greece. Its result was a type of society consisting of a group of free inhabitants, who lived in an identifiable territory with some kind of city centre, and who claimed to exercise a form of self-government which might but did not necessarily include a foreign policy of its own.' The existence of the polis as a socio-political system depended on a sense of territorial and social coherence, both as a subjective experience and as a practice in common activities. This sense of coherence was the outcome of a number of separate but mutually influential processes. Among the most significant and most intensely debated factors involved in the materialisation of the archaic polis are population growth, development of common cults, military cooperation especially in the hoplite falanx, the creation of written laws, changes in political discourse, and changing political consciousness in relation to (re)organization of space.2