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Like other Western philosophers, Machiavelli was influenced by the early Greek philosophers, especially Plato. However, in many cases Machiavelli seems to be arguing against Platonic philosophy. Plato believed in just rulers, who ruled via moral virtue. Machiavelli believed in "Virtu'", whatever was best for the State was Virtu'. In Plato's time, man served the state. According to Monarch notes on The Republic: The basic idea referred to is the view that ethics and politics are the same, or at least co-terminous (overlapping in essential features). There was no distinction between private life and public life, as there is today. There was no such concept as the "invasion of privacy," perhaps because no Athenian felt that he had a private life that was to be kept distinct from his public life.
Currently Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" is trying to alter the way people think and behave according to their own agenda. The "Moral Majority" believes its way to behave is correct and all other modes of behavior or actions are false and evil and should be censored. Mill argues the problem is that we can never be sure that anything is totally false (18). Falsehoods are often sprinkled with specks of truth. If we censor a person's actions completely, we would lose those specks of truth that are sprinkled amongst the falsehoods. According to Mill by censoring the actions of others:
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The concept of a tripartite agency of existence: body, soul, and god, does not completely parallel to Plato either. Plato believed in the physical world, the world of forms, and the greatest form of a...
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Hume utilizes intelligence as his method of persuasion; he speaks as if every learned individual will ultimately accept his ideas as correct and attempt to persuade the rest of the population to shy a...
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This does not seem to address a "shortcoming" in Sartre's philosophy since Sartre implies a similar thing in the primacy of the for-itself over all external values and "universal truths" which are fal...
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26/11/2008 17:44
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Here Hume goes too far. In defense of his own argument, he makes a claim he cannot prove through experience. He is rationalizing that experiences differ between individuals because we all have differe...
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09/12/2008 17:49
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