FOUNDATIONS: Locke & the Trajectory of Rational Chauvinism, Part 2
In Season 2 - our FOUNDATIONS series - we’ll examine European philosophers from the 17th through the 19th centuries, to see how their views have shaped and defined our own… whether we realize it or not.
Following Locke as he begins to craft and assemble the building blocks of Civil Society, to ward off the State of War. We consider Locke’s view of humankind as naturally driven toward nearly perfect versions of freedom, reason, and equality that are impossible in the imperfect realm of governments, institutions, and laws.
We’ll consider Locke as one of the philosophers who initiated a trend we saw culminate with John Stuart Mill: establishing a notion of rational progress in society, and what we’ve been calling a “Rational Chauvinism” in the European worldview. But did aspects of Locke’s optimism about humanity also fuel later misunderstandings of our relationship to reason, and freedom?
In this show we discuss a short article by Cory Doctorow that can be found here.
***SEASON TWO READINGS AND SOURCES***
On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
John Locke's 2nd Treatise on Civil Government, by John Locke
Meditations on First Philosophy, by René Descartes
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by Tyson Yunkaporta
A Treatise of Human Nature [Books 1-3], by David Hume
Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Encyclopedia Logic (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Series #1), by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosophy of Mind: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Series #3), by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Thom Brooks, Editor)
A FREEDOM OF IDEAS may be found online at afreedomofideas.com.
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