Results for PHIL13

What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This course examines tcourse examines these questions in the modern period, from the rise of revolutionary ideas to the experiences of totalitarianism and decolonization in the twentieth century. Authors include Locke, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon. This course is part of the Humanities Core, a collaborative set of global humanities seminars that brings all of its students and faculty into conversation. On Mondays you meet in your own course, and on Wednesdays all the HumCore seminars (in session that quarter) meet together: https://humanitiescore.stanford.edu/.

Most people are not your fellow citizens. (Over 95% of human beings, for example, are not Americans.) What do you owe to them as a matter of justice? What do they owe to you? Should you save a foreigner's life instead of buying luxuries for yourself? Should you boycott 'fast fashion' produced by exploited workers abroad? Should universities divest from fossil fuels? How can a country like the United States justify forcefully preventing anyone from crossing its borders? Is anything absolutely prohibited to win a war? When examining such issues, we need to start with facts¿facts about poverty, inequality, climate change, immigration, etc. After surveying the basic facts, we will use philosophical readings to focus and deepen our discussions of what justice requires across borders. Some of the topics we discuss will be chosen on the basis of students' interests.