1A. Teaching and related instructional assignments

 Materials produced during 05/06 for use in Hum344 Summer 06

Powerpoints:

The American Transcendentalists

I. Traditional Views

II. Authenticity Part One: Intuition  (95 slides; may take a while to download)

III. Authenticity Part Two: Expressivism (130 slides)

IV. Authenticity Part Three: Integrity  (59 slides)

V. Modern rethinkings:Charles Taylor lecture  (229 slides)

The Harlem Renaissance and the Beats: applied Romanticism

Harlem Renaissance I  (249 slides)

Harlem Renaissance II  (291 slides)

The Beats I  (146 slides)

The Beats II  (319 slides)

IB. Development of New Courses or Innovative Approaches

I.  New courses on international political theory.

 1.      Phil 362, Spring 2002: Philosophy of Law: Human Rights and International Law,

One of the most interesting and significant legal developments in the years since the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals at the end of World War Two has been the emergence of an important body of international law that defines and criminalizes certain offenses: crimes of war, crimes of peace, and crimes against humanity. For the first time, it is against international law to wage aggressive warfare, to kill innocent civilians, to torture, to rape, to "disappear," to maintain a system of apartheid, tocommit genocide, and to destroy art and culture, or to conspire to do any of these things. Observance has not kept up with the law: there have been terriblecrimes committed. The saturation of the jungles of Vietnam with Agent Orange, the massacre of millions by the Pol Pot government in Cambodia, the murders by Idi Amin Dada in Uganda, the horrible atrocities including mass rape in the former Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan genocide where 800,000 Tutsis were killed in only three months, testify to the fact that the law has not had much deterrent effect. Nor until very recently were offenders brought to court: gross offenders such as Duvalier retired with impunity to their estates. But the recent institution of the Rwandan and Yugoslavian Criminal Tribunals and the current trial of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the World Court in the Hague suggest that practice is starting to catch up.

2.      Phil 460, Winter 2003: Advanced Issues in Value Theory: Theories of International Justice

Ethics contains various theories that purport to tell individuals how to act: utilitarianism, rights theories, Kantianism; or how to be: Aristotelianism. Political theory deals with people collectively, as citizens living together as a civic body. Here we find theories about the proper relationship between citizens and state: liberalism, conservatism, socialism & Marxism, anarchism, fascism; and analyses of important concepts such as liberty, equality, and justice.

If we move to discussing he actions of states with respect to each other, we are in the realm of international ethics and political theory. The major theories at this level divide according to how they see the moral-political international obligations of states (or other entities). Realism, for example, holds that morality does not apply to the actions of states because states will and should act only in their own self-interest. International lawyers and contractarians typically hold that the only obligations that morally bind states arise from their consent to the treaties and other contractual agreements that make up declaratory international law. Others hold that there is beyond this a customary international law that binds states even without their express consent. Natural law theorists and ideal contractarians hold that there is a universal set of obligations and rights possessed by states--they differ over the origins of those moral obligations. Cosmopolitans hold that states do not have a deep moral status, only individuals do, and so state sovereignty can be abridged if necessary to protect individuals from that state, or to provide individuals with what they need to survive. Nationalists argue that moral obligations and moral concepts stop at local borders, whether of states or of nations or peoples; the sovereignty of states is inviolable. Some argue for local or world-wide federations of states, some for a world government that would supersede states. Some argue that states are becoming obsolete due to economic globalization and the increasingly significant activities of international agencies that cut across state borders, as well as the increasing urgency of problems such as environmental degradation and human rights protection that cannot, or cannot easily, be dealt with by states.

3. Phil 361, Spring 2004: Issues in Social and Political Theory: Terrorism and International Justice.

Political Philosophy in general is about how people ought to organize their collective affairs. Political science may tell us how different states in fact govern themselves. Political philosophy wants to know what is the best way for a people to govern itself. It is concerned with issues such as justice, equality, freedom, and democracy. This version of Philosophy 361 is concerned with issues of international justice.   It has two parts. The first discusses general theories of international justice and morality. The second uses this theoretical framework to discuss a particularly urgent contemporary issue in applied international political philosophy: terrorism. We shall look at questions such as "What is terrorism? Is there a neutral description or is one person’s terrorist another person’s freedom fighter?" "Is terrorism always wrong? Or are there circumstances in which it might be justified?"

4. Phil 362, Fall 2005: Philosophy of Law: International Law and Human Rights,

When our rights are violated, it is to the law that we turn for redress. This course will begin by introducing students to philosophical conceptions of rights, both moral (or human), and legal. In the second part of the course, we will look at issues of human rights and international law.  We will pay special attention to the ways in which such rights are enshrined in international law, beginning with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which recognizes the following as rights possessed by all people on the planet:

    1.  MINORITY CULTURES AND GROUP RIGHTS : THE RIGHT TO RECOGNITION AND CONTINUED EXISTENCE; RIGHTS AGAINST GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING.

       2.  WOMEN’S RIGHTS: THE RIGHT TO POLITICAL EQUALITY; THE RIGHT TO BE FREE OF SEXUAL SLAVERY, FORCED PROSTITUTION AND RAPE            

     3.  GAY AND LESBIAN RIGHTS: THE RIGHT TO BE FREE FROM DISCRIMINATION AND OPPRESSION

    4.  HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: THE RIGHT TO A LIVABLE ENVIRONMENT: THE RIGHTS OF FUTURE GENERATIONS TO INHERIT A SUSTAINABLE WORLD.     

    5.  HABEAS CORPUS & DUE PROCESS: THE RIGHT TO A FAIR TRIAL IN A TIMELY FASHION; TO AN ATTORNEY; TO KNOW THE CHARGES AGAINST ONE; TO NOT BE TORTURED OR COERCIVELY INTERROGATED; THE RIGHT TO CONTACT WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD. 

    6. ECONOMIC RIGHTS: THE RIGHT TO A SUBSISTENCE LIVING, TO FAIR WAGES AND BENEFITS, TO UNIONIZATION, TO A NON-DEGRADING AND SAFE WORK ENVIRONMENT, AND TO BE FREE OF EXPLOITATION AND SLAVERY.

    7. The rights to  SAFETY & SECURITY: PROTECTION FROM GENOCIDE, ETHNIC CLEANSING, RACIAL, ETHNIC OR RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION, “DISAPPEARING,” CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT AND TORTURE. 

    8.  THE RIGHT TO AID: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION INTO THE AFFAIRS OF SOVEREIGN NATIONS

    We cannot study all of these rights in ten weeks. Student interest will determine which of them we discuss after the general philosophical foundations have been laid.

      5. Phil 460, Winter 2006: Selected Topics: Democracy and Globalization.

Not so long ago we lived in a world where the pressing political issues we faced were local enough that they could be handled within the jurisdiction of a single state such as the United States or France. But in the last few decades a number of things have occurred that make this less and less feasible: the growth and spread of international corporations and international trade agreements; environmental problems such as pollution and global warming; the rise of a human rights movement which demands intervention by the international community when states abuse their citizens; widespread and dire poverty that is beyond the ability of a single state to fix, and more.This is the process known as “globalization.”

Globalization raises serious issues about how political matters are to be handled. It is usually assumed, and we shall assume in this course, that it is desirable to handle them in a democratic manner. If so, we must rethink democratic theory which was designed to cover the relationship between the citizens of a single state and the government of that state. Democratic theory says that it is the will of the people that should decide what public policy will be. But with global issues, who are the people? What mechanisms can there be to represent them? Can there be democracy when there is no world government? Could a world government be democratic?

 II. Innovative approaches:

                                         John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government

                                                             John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration

                                                            Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

                                                            Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

                                                            Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

                                                           John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

                                                           Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

                Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics  (Phil 191 F05, W06, S06)

                Plato, Apology (Spring 06)

                Plato, Crito   (Spring 06)