Introduction to Political Philosophy with Steven B. Smith

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates confidently, defiantly asserts to his listeners, to his audience. Nothing else matters for him.

Perhaps the oldest and most fundamental question that I wish to examine in the course of this semester is the question: what is a regime? What are regimes? What are regime politics? The term "regime" is a familiar one. We often hear today about shaping regimes or about changing regimes, but what is a regime? How many kinds are there? How are they d... See more

Among the oldest and still most fundamental questions are: what is justice? What are the goals of a decent society? How should a citizen be educated? Why should I obey the law, and what are the limits, if any, to my obligation? What constitutes the ground of human dignity? Is it freedom? Is it virtue? Is it love, is it friendship?

We continue to ask the same questions that were asked by Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others. We may not accept their answers and it's very likely that we do not, but their questions are often put with a kind of unrivaled clarity and insight. The fact is that there are still people in the world, many people, who regard themselves as Aristotelian... See more

The great thinkers are great not because they've created some set of museum pieces that can be catalogued, admired, and then safely ignored like a kind of antiquities gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; but rather because they have defined the problems that all later thinkers and scholars have had to use in order to make sense of their world... See more