Whether John Locke's Two Treatises is a justification of revolution or a demand for revolution, it is a book about political revolution. Yet it is also a book about property. This is so not only because of the obviously central place that Locke's discussion of property holds in the Second Treatise but also because his account of when revolution is justified hinges, in three crucial respects, on his account of how private, or, exclusive, rights to property arise.

Two Treatises of Government de John Locke propone dos pactos, uno que funda el Estado y otro que funda el gobierno. La presencia de estos dos pactos supone profundas diferencias con el contractualismo hobbesiano y abre la puerta a la teoría de la resistencia lockeana. En este artículo se analizan con cierto detalle las características de ambos pactos a la luz no solo de TT sino también de otros textos de Locke a fin de precisar la especificidad y originalidad de (...) su propuesta política. Ello supondrá discutir con la lectura de intérpretes clásicos como John Dunn y John Simmons, así como otros más contemporáneos como Lee Ward y Robert Faulkner. (shrink)

A recent spate of books on the life and legacy of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, notably Steven B. Smith's Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, and Judaism , suggests a desperate effort to salvage Strauss and the Straussian school of political philosophy from the wreckage of American neoconservatism. Although a number of these works are quite thoughtful and helpfully counter many of the more extreme (and uglier) charges made concerning the meaning of Straussianism and its political influence, their general drift (...) in fact confirms what the more responsible critics of this school have long maintained about its tendency to oppose positions that would help advance meaningful social change and social justice. Key Words: Leo Strauss • Straussianism • Platonism • esoteric writing • zeteti-cism • Socratic • skepticism • relativism • fideism. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, the concept of natural law was linked with that of “innate ideas”. Natural laws were said to be ideas imprinted by nature or by God on men's minds and were the very foundation of religion and morality. Locke's attack on innate ideas in the first book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is therefore considered to be an assault on natural law. Modern critics like Peter Laslett, W. von Leyden and Philip Abrams are of the opinion (...) that Locke's critique of innate ideas in the Essay cannot be reconciled with the concept of natural law in the Two Treatises of Government. (shrink)

This chapter presents the reception of Leo Strauss by analytic philosophers after Strauss’s emigration to the United States. It gives a brief survey of the polemics against Strauss and his school by analytic philosophers, which aided in the self-constitution of analytic philosophy as a rival school of thought in philosophy. But most of the chapter is devoted to recovering the significance and influence of a criticism of Strauss by Ernest Nagel. The chapter argues that this response is of intrinsic interest (...) because it involves the relationship between science and values. Nagel’s response was foundational to Felix Oppenheim’s political philosophy or what Oppenheim called his project of ‘conceptual reconstruction.’ Lurking in Oppenheim’s response to Strauss are questions about the role of the principle of sufficient reason in philosophy. Rge chapter argues that an opportunity was missed to clarify questions pertaining to the inductive risk of philosophy more than a half century before these issues became fashionable again. (shrink)

The focus of my dissertation is a general and comprehensive examination of Locke’s view of divine power. My basic argument is that John Locke is a theological voluntarist in his understanding of God’s creative and providential relationship with the world, including both the natural and moral order. As a voluntarist, Locke holds that God freely imposes both the physical and moral laws of nature onto creation by means of his will: this contrasts with the intellectualist perspective in which the laws (...) of nature emerge from the essences of things. For Locke, there are no intrinsically necessary laws in the created order: both physical and moral laws are arbitrary determinations of the divine will. While these laws are not intrinsically necessary, they are hypothetically necessary. Hypothetical necessity involves things that could have been otherwise, but which are necessary based on the supposition of a free action and other relevant conditions pertaining to the actor. Concerning God, we can understand hypothetical necessity in the following way: □ [ → Y]. X is a variable that ranges over a subset of contingent propositions about actions. ‘P’ is the proposition ‘God is perfect’. And Y is any proposition that is a necessary consequent of both X and P. In any possible world in which God performs X, it is the case that Y will obtain. Supposing that God decides to create beings like us, God must of necessity craft the moral laws of nature in a way that harmonizes with our nature. What grounds this necessity is that God must act consistently with the perfection of the divine nature: to give us a different law would be less than perfect. Furthermore, I argue that certain physical laws of nature – those that help to realize our nature – are also hypothetically necessary. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia la aplicación de la ley de la naturaleza en el estado de naturaleza. En este sentido, se analizará la definición abstracta de libertad, su correspondencia con el concepto práctico de libertad natural y la oposición de este último con la esclavitud que supone nacer sometido a un gobierno despótico. Posteriormente, se considerará la potestad de infringir castigos bajo pena capital y su derivación, a través de la guerra justa, en la figura de esclavitud legítima. De este modo, (...) se plantearán las tensiones que surgen al contrastar la crítica del absolutismo y la conquista con la legitimación de un poder privado despótico. (shrink)