This seminar is a philosophical introduction to Simone Weil and her legacy. Weil is one of the most original thinkers of the 20th-century. Although she was only thirty-four years old when she died, Weil had first-hand experience of some of the worst afflictions of the 20th-Century: She worked in factories and farms that were in inhuman conditions; she fought as a Republican volunteer during the Spanish Civil War; she joined the Resistance during the Second World War. Her thinking is non-abstract and non-ideological because it is based on her concrete experience. For example, it is her experience as factory worker and union activist that helped her develop a penetrating critique of Marxism and a political thinking that is an alternative to both liberalism and Marxism. Weil also draws upon from a wide range of intellectual and spiritual resources: Greek literature, Plato, the Bible, Christian mysticism, Daoism, Indian philosophy, Buddhism, and mathematics. Weil’s admirers used to be mostly writers, such as Camus, T. S. Eliot, Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Flannery O’Connor, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Oliver. Weil’s reputation and influence as a philosopher had been slight until quite recently when we started to see that her thought plays a prominent role in philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch, and that there is a deep and subtle affinity between her thinking and Wittgenstein’s thinking. We shall also read some of these writers and philosophers whose visions have been shaped by her.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing
We will take recent political movements in Hong Kong, from peaceful “civil disobedience” to violent “revolutionary movements” (such as the Hong Kong independence movement), as a point of departure and a case study in order to motivate us to think about a set of important topics, to which little attention has been paid by mainstream political philosophers. Here are some examples of these topics we will be focusing on. (1) The distinction between “power” and “violence” in politics. We offer justifications of civil disobedience as a paradigm of what Arendt calls “acting in concert in public spaces” that can generate “power”. (2) The relationship between “theory” and “practice” in politics. We examine a small group of political thinkers (Tocqueville, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Arendt), who have argued that we should be skeptical of “theory” and “expertise” in politics. We pay special attention to their critiques of what they call “literary politics”, “rationalism in politics”, or “ideological politics”, using the Hong Kong independence movement as a case study. (3) The indispensability of “opinions” and the central importance of “judging” or “thinking without a banister” in politics. Here we will also look at what Lionel Trilling, Oakeshott, and Arendt have to say about the essential role of liberal arts education in cultivating the “negative capacity” for imagination and judgment in politics. (4) Emotions such as pity, compassion, shame, and honor in politics. (5) Truth and reconciliation in politics. The future of Hong Kong depends on whether people in Hong Kong and mainland China can find ways to overcome polarization and hatred.
Prerequisites: PSCI 101Y and 102Y Quest for Justice.
This course is a philosophical introduction to the traditions of republicanism in a global and contemporary context. Authors we will be reading include Hannah Arendt, Gordon Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, Eric Nelson, Cecile Laborde, Robert Bellah, Michael Oakeshott, Zeng Guofan, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Yan Fu. We will try to articulate key concepts in the republican traditions, such as liberty as non-domination, the rule of law, constitutional authority, constituent power, the common good, public happiness, civil religion, citizenship, corruption, virtue vs. commerce, and bios vs. zoe. We will be interested in the founding, the decline, the distortion, and the rebirth of the republican traditions in different countries such as America and China. We will pay special attention to the limits of certain versions of republicanism that conceptualize it as a “theory” or “ideology,” and the advantages of reconceptualizing it as traditions or forms of life (in Oakeshott’s or Wittgenstein’s sense) or spirits (in Arendt’s sense) so that it may become an alternative to various contemporary theories or ideologies. We will also explore ways in which the “perfectionist” version of republicanism found in Arendt, Pocock, and Bellah may be said to be better than the “anti-perfectionist” version found in Skinner and Pettit, and Arendt’s critique of biopolitics to be better than Agamben’s critique. We will use the coronavirus pandemic as a case study when we discuss the last topic.
Prerequisites: PSCI 101Y and 102Y Quest for Justice.