Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
comparison of christiaity with chinese philosophies
any in the Enlightenment were unsatisfied with existing doctrines in political philosophy, which seemed to marginalize or neglect the possibility of a democratic state.Jean-Jacques Ruosseau was among those who attempted to overturn these doctrines: he responded to Hobbes by claiming that a human is by nature a kind of "novle savage", and that society and social contracts corrupt this nature. Another critic was John Locke. In second treatise on movement he agreed with Hobbes that the nation-state was an efficient tool for raising humanity out of a deplorable state, but he argued that the sovereign might become an abominable institution compared to the relatively benign unmodulated state of nature.
Following the doctrine of the fact-value distinction, due in part to the influence of david hume and his student Adam Smith , appeals to human nature for political justification were weakened. Nevertheless, many political philosophers, especially moral realistits , still make use of some essential human nature as a basis for their arguments.