Spring 2002
Professor Balbus
Political Science 504: Theoretical Approaches
to Policy and Governance
This course encourages a
careful reading of three of the most important, widely discussed and debated
works of philosophy of the last quarter of the 20th century that
raise questions about the epistemologies that govern the study of politics:
Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Hans-Georg
Gadamer's Truth and Method, and Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory
of Communicative Action: Volume I. Thus the course also serves as an
introduction to central issues in analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, and critical
theory. Richard Bernstein's overview, Beyond
Objectivism and Relativism, is also required, as is a take-home final
examination and one oral presentation in class. The four required texts
referred to above are all available for purchase at the Circle Center
bookstore.
Weeks 1-2
I. Introduction and overview
Required: Bernstein, Beyond Obiectivism and Relativism
Weeks 3-6 II. Analytic Philosophy
Required: Rorty, Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature Recommended
1. Works Referred to in the Text P.F. Strawson, Individuals
, The Bounds of Sense
George Pitcher, A Theory of
Perception
D.M. Armstrong, Perception
and the Physical World
, A Materialist Theory of
Mind
John Dewey, The Quest for
Certainty
ExDerience and Nature
John Locke, Essay
Concerning the Understanding
Wilfrid Sellars, Science,
Perception, and Reality
, Science and Metaphysics
Rene Descartes, Discourse
on Method
, Meditations
Willis Doney, Descartes:
Critical Essays
Michael Hooker, Descartes:
Critical and InterRretive
Essays
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept
of Mind
Jerome Shaffer, Philosophy
of Mind
-2-
O.P. Wood and George Pitcher, Ryle:
Critical Essays Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, The Essential Tension
Israel Schefflerl Science
and Subiectivity
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosoohicus
The Philosophical Investigations
George Pitcher, The
Philosophical Investigations:
Critical Essays
Hilary Putnam, Mind,
Lancfuacfe, and Reality
Meaning and the Moral Sciences Realism With a Human Face
Richard Popkin, History of Skepticism From Erasmus to Descartes
Alfred N. Whitehead, Science
and the Modern World , Process and Reality
George Kline, A.N.
Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophv
David Hume, Inguiry
Concerning Human Understanding Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probabilitv
, Why Does Lancruage Matter
to PhilosophV?
Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology Introduction
to MetaphVsics
Being and Time
The End of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledcfe of the External World
Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought
Donald Davidson, Incruiries Into Truth and
Interpretation and G. Harman, Semantics of Natural
Language and Jaakko Hintikka, Words and
objections: Essays on ouine
W.V. Quine, Word and Object
From a Logical Point of View Ontological Relativity and
Other Essays Ways of Paradox
Michael Dummett, Frege's
Philosophy of Language , Logical Basis of Metaphysics A.J. Ayer, Lanauage,
Truth and Loqic
P. Feyerabend, Against Method
and G. Maxwell, Mind,
Matter and Method Clifford Geertz, The interpretation of Culture
Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation
' Analytic Philosophy and
the
Geisteswissenschaften
, Charles S. Peirce: From
Pragmatism... Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics...
2. Additional Works by Rortv
The Linguistic Turn
The Consequences of Pragmatism
Contingency, Irony and Solidaritv
Objectivity, Relativism and
Truth: Volume I
3. Commentaries
Richard J. Bernstein, The
New Constellation, ch.8-9 Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions,
chap.1 and "Postscript" to chap. 1.
William G. Weaver,
"Richard Rorty and the Radical Left", Virginia Law Review,
vol.78, pp.729-57. Nancy Fraser, "Solidarity or singularity?: Richard
Rorty Between Romanticism and Technocracy", in Unruly Practices,
pp. 93-110.
Alan R. Malachowski, ed.,
Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to
Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature (and Beyond).
Weeks
7-10 III. Hermeneutics
Required: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth
and Method
Recommended
1. Works Referred to in the Text
John Stuart Mill, The Logic
of the Moral Sciences David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature
Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction
to the Human Sciences
. Poetry and Experience
F. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics:
The Handwritten
Manuscripts
Georg Hegel, Phenomenology
of Spirit , Logic
Charles Taylor, Hegel
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologica
Thomas Reid, The
Philosophical Works
Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Judgment
Criticrue of Pure Reason Criticrue of Practical
Reason Metaphysics of Morals Edmund Husserl, Logical
Investigations
The Crisis of European
Sciences...
Henri Bergson,'6re@ative
Evolution
F. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man
J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture
J.G. Droysen, Outline of
the Principles of Historv
Georg Misch, The Dawn of
Philosophy
Plato, The Collected
Dialogues of Plato
Aristotle, Politics
I The Ethics of Aristotle
Wilhelm Humboldt, Philosophy
of Language
E.D. Hirsch, Validity in
Interpretation
2. Additional Works by Gadamer
Philosophical Hermeneutics
Reason in the Age of Science
"The Problem of
Historical Consciousness", in Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, Interpretive
Social
Science: A Reader
3. Commentaries
Lawrence Schmidt, The
Epistemology of H.G. Gadamer Kathleen Wright, Festivals of
Interpretation
George Warnke, Gadamer:
Hermeneutics, Tradition.
H.J. Silverman, Gadamer and
Hermeneutics
Joel Weisenheimer, Gadamer's
Hermeneutics: A Readincf of Truth and Method
Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics:
Interpretive Theorv in Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer
Jurgen Habermas, A Review
of Gadamer's Truth and Method, in Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A.
McCarthy, Understanding and Social Inquiry, pp.335-63
Seyla Benhabib and Fred
Dallmayr, The Communicative Ethics Controversy
Jack Mendelsen, "The
Habermas-Gadamer Debate", New German Criticrue 18 (1979),
pp.44-73.
Dieter Misgeld, "Critical
Theory and Hermeneutics: The Debate Between Gadamer and Habermas", in John
O'Neil, On Critical Theory, pp. 164-83.
Martin Jay, "Should
Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?: Reflections on the
Habermas-Gadamer Debate", in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, Modern
European Intellectual History, pp.86-110.
Weeks
11-14 III. Critical Theory
Required
Jurgen Habermas, The Theory
of Communicative Action: Volume I
Recommended
1. Works Referred to in the Text
Stephen Toulmin, The Uses
of Argument
× Human
Understanding
, et. al., Introduction to
Reasoning
Jean Piaget, Principles of
Genetic Epistemology
R. Horton and R. Finnegan, Modes of Thought
. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Macric
Bryan Wilson, Rationality
A. MacIntyre, Against the Self-Image of the Age
R.W. Rieber, Body and Mind
I.C. Jarvie, Rationality
and Relativism
and J. Agassie, Rationality:
The Critical View
Karl Popper, Oblective
Knowledqe
and J.C. Eccles, The Self
and its Brain Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of Action Max
Weber, Economy and Societv
I The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitaiism@@
H.H. Girth and C. Wright
Mills, From Max Weber Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern
Society Studies in Social and Political Theory
Central Problems in Social
TheorV I.
Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs
and A. Musgrave, Criticism
and the Growth
Knowledge
Peter Winch, The Idea of
Social Science
,, "Understanding a Primitive Society", in
Dallmayr and McCarthy, Understanding
and Social
Inquiry, pp.159-88.
Alfred Schutz, Collected
Papers
, The Phenomenologv of the
Social
World
Harold Garfinkel, Studies
in Ethnomethodoloqv
M. Brand and D. Walton, Action
Theory
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On
Certaintv
J.L. Austin, How to do
Things With Words
John Searle, Speech Acts
G. Evans and J. McDowell, Truth and Meaning
M. Kreckel, Communicative Acts and Shared Knowledge
W. Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism
Hans Blumenberg, The
Legitimacy of the Modern Age
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of
Reason
-6-
Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment
Theodor Adorno, Negative
Dialectics
Susan Buck-Morss, The
Origin of Negative Dialectics
Georg Lukacs, History and
Class Consciousness
2. Additional Works by Habermas
On the Logic of the Social
Sciences Knowledge
and Human Interests Communication and the Evolution of Society Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action Justification and Application
3. Commentaries
Thomas McCarthy, The
Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas
Richard Bernstein, Habermas
and Modernity John Thompson and David Held, Habermas: Critical Debates
John Thompson, Critical
Hermeneutics David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas
Alessandro Ferrara, "A
Critique of Habermas' Diskursethik", Telos, no. 64 (Summer 1985), pp. 45-
74.
Isaac D. Balbus, Marxism
and Domination, chap.6.
I "Habermas and Feminism:
(Male)
Communication and the
Evolution of (Patriarchal) Society", New Political Science (Winter
1984), pp.27-47.
Nancy Fraser, "What's
Critical About Critical Theory?: The Case of Habermas and Gender", in
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, Feminism as Critic[ue, pp.31-56.
Iris Marion Young,
"Impartiality and the Civic Public", in Benhabib and Cornell, Feminism
as Critique, pp.57-76.
Week 15 PARTY!
Other Overviews
Richard Bernstein, The
Restructuring of Social and Political
Theory
Jurgen Habermas, On the
Logic of the Social Sciences
-7-
David Braybrooke, Philosophy
of Social Science
Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A.
McCarthy, Understanding and
Social Inquiry
Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding
and Explanation
Gerard Radnitzky, Contemporary
Theories of Meta-Science
Paul Rabinow and William M.
Sullivan, Interpretive Social
Science: a Reader
Josef Bleicher, Contemporary
Hermeneutics , The Hermeneutic Imagination Zygmunt Bauman, Hermeneutics
and Social Science David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination
Works in Feminist Theory
The following works have
helped shape my reading of the required
texts:
Susan Bordo, The Flight to
Obiectivity
Nancy Chodorow, The
Repoduction of Mothering
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The
Mermaid and the Minotaur
Carol Gilligan, In a
Different Voice
Evelyn Fox Keller, Gender
and Science
Sandra Harding and Merill B.
Hintikka, Discovering Reality