Name: 1. 序章です。政治哲学とは何か？ (1. Introduction: What is Political Philosophy?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T04:47:18.000Z
Duration: 37 min 6 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Professor Steven Smith: Let me start today by asking the

question, "what is political philosophy?"

Custom dictates that I say something about the subject

This in some ways might seem a case of putting the cart before

the horse, or the cart before the course maybe,

because how can you say, how can we say what political

Anyway, let me try to say something that might be useful.

philosophy is simply a branch or what we call a subfield of the

field of political science. Yes, all right.

It exists alongside of other areas of political inquiry like

American government, comparative politics,

and international relations. Yet in another sense,

political philosophy is something much different than

simply a subfield; it seems to be the oldest and

most fundamental part of political science.

Its purpose is to lay bare, as it were, the fundamental

problems, the fundamental concepts and categories which

frame the study of politics. In this respect it seems to me

much less like just a branch of political science than the

The study of political philosophy often begins as this

course will do also, with the study of the great

books or some of the great books of our field.

Political philosophy is the oldest of the social sciences,

and it can boast a wealth of heavy hitters from Plato and

You might say that the best way to learn what political

philosophy is, is simply to study and read the

works of those who have shaped the field--yes,

Why study just these thinkers and not others?

Is not any so-called list of great thinkers or great texts

likely to be simply arbitrary and tell us more about what such

Furthermore, it would seem that the study of

the great books or great thinkers of the past can easily

degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism,

into a sort of pedantry. We find ourselves easily

intimidated by a list of famous names and end up not thinking

doesn't the study of old books, often very old books,

risk overlooking the issues facing us today?

What can Aristotle or Hobbes tells us about the world of

Doesn't political science make any progress?

After all, economists no longer read Adam Smith.

that you will never read Adam Smith in an economics course

here at Yale, and it is very unlikely that

you will read Freud in your psychology classes.

So why then does political science, apparently uniquely

among the social sciences, continue to study Aristotle,

These are all real questions, and I raise them now myself

because they are questions I want you to be thinking about as

you do your reading and work through this course.

I want you to remain alive to them throughout the semester.

One reason I want to suggest that we continue to read these

books is not because political science makes no progress,

or that we are somehow uniquely fixated on an ancient past,

but because these works provide us with the most basic questions

We continue to ask the same questions that were asked by

We may not accept their answers and it's very likely that we do

not, but their questions are often put with a kind of

unrivaled clarity and insight. The fact is that there are

Thomists, Lockeans, Kantians, even the occasional

Marxist can still be found in Ivy League universities.

These doctrines have not simply been refuted,

they remain in many ways constitutive of our most basis

outlooks and attitudes. They are very much alive with

us today, right. So political philosophy is not

just some kind of strange historical appendage attached to

the trunk of political science; it is constitutive of its

deepest problems. If you doubt the importance of

the study of political ideas for politics, consider the works of

everyone's heard of him. Keynes wrote in 1935.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers,

both when they are right and when they are wrong,

are more powerful than is commonly understood....Practical

men," Keynes continues, practical men "who believe

themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual

influences, are usually the slave of some

who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy

from some academic scribbler of a few years back" .

So this course will be devoted to the study of those "academic

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1. 序章です。政治哲学とは何か？ (1. Introduction: What is Political Philosophy?)

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