Philosophers typically present ideal and nonideal theories as distinct analytical frameworks. For example, Plato whom viewed the realm of becoming as “impenetrable and full of shadows,” presented his Republic as a top-down idealized view of…

The persuasiveness of Charles Mills’ paper Racial Liberalism (2007) arises from the fact that it plays off one’s pre-theoretic beliefs about the lacunae between the ideals of liberalism as a political philosophy and the practices…

If a “world republic” is desirable, how should proposals for it be defended? This paper draws on Pauline Kleingeld’s defense of Immanuel Kant’s program for perpetual peace to argue that social contractarian accounts of the…

Writing more than 1650 years after Aristotle’s death,  Thomas Aquinas inhabited a world that would have been absolutely foreign to Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle lived before the age of monotheistic religion, Aquinas was a Catholic priest…

The Second Treatise of Government (1690) presents the presumed right to appropriate parts of the commons as private property by labouring (hereafter, theory of property) as the justification for the political and economic inequality between…

Prior to August 4th, 1914, the date when Canada entered that fateful “war to end all wars”, a vigilant Parliament, a diverse array of unwritten civil rights, and an independent judiciary promised to shield the…

The British North America Act (1867): Emergency Power and Implied Rights A meaningful discussion of the use of emergency power to suspend citizen-rights during the Implied Rights era cannot take place without first considering the…

In “Book II” of The Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus present two crude images of the completely unjust and just person exemplifying the belief that appearing just is more advantageous than being just. The modifier complete…

I’m reading sections of Thomas Aquinas’ “Treatise on Law”. In the first section of the text, Aquinas defines the law as “a rule or measure of action by which one is led to action or…

I Reality and sensuousness is “human sensuous activity, practice”. Human activity is an “objective activity”. Practice, especially revolutionary practical-critical activity, is extremely significant. II The only way to know whether objective truth is attributable to…

9.1.2 Purifying the Feverish City: Stories about the Gods & Heroes (386a-392a) To continue purifying the Feverish City of luxury, they next reflect on the stories young guardians, if they’re to become courageous,1 philosophic, and…

Constitutional relativists endorse the hypothesis that the constitution “creates or recognizes a constitutional law of necessity” obliging the Executive, as “Lord protector of the constitution”, to use its discretion to protect the constitutional order during…

Imagine CSIS has detained an individual, and they’re totally confident he or she has planted a bomb containing weaponized anthrax in the Eaton’s Centre. The bomb may detonate at any minute potentially exposing tens of…

Part 5: The Problem Stated: Glaucon and Adeimantus’ challenge to Socrates (357a-367e) By the end of Book 1, Socrates has not only logically defeated and “tamed” the sophist Thrasymachus. He has foreshadowed how he will…

In State of Exception (2005), Agamben advances three theses. 1) The modern state of exception, a legal institution rooted in the democratic-revolutionary tradition, has gradually become the paradigmatic form of government in the twentieth century….

The inaugural post of this blog is a summary of Book 1 of the Plato’s Republic, the first of ten installments in a series which summarizes the Republic.  You might rightly wonder why the first work I have chosen…