Democracy and Reason Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Democracy and Reason - Essay Example Though the liberal democratic philosophy has always been supported from a wide assortment of philosophical quarters, realizing liberal democracy in terms of joint rational practice of community in politics has various attractive features. One attractive feature is being a perspective that comes across with the hunch so extensively introduced at the parturition of liberalism i.e. the intuition that the belief in the morals of liberal democracy and reason are not simply historically related but are linked logically in some cardinal ways. Moreover, the philosophy of logical or rational practice appears sufficiently capacious and complex to institute the whole array of values and norms present in liberalism such as equality, liberty, toleration, participation, community and rights instead of singling out and raising one of these values at the cost of rest of others. Thus there lies a possibility that liberal democratic theory can be grounded on a philosophically practicable construct of rational practice, thereby accommodating the interests of the communitarians with the best part of skeptical utilitarian as well as deontological variants of liberalism. The inclination of neo-Platonist to logically explain rationality has endured with full force in the twentieth century. It manifested not only by the widespread utilization of the term logical as a synonym for rational, but also in the propensity to interpret scientific question as applied logic and to construe languages as fallible logical calculi. This excessively idealized and constrained explanation of rationality has gained individuals by inducing the tremendously productive and significant mathematical constituents of science and by prodding all disciplines towards superior clarity and rigor. However it had various unfortunate consequences. It has impaired individuals with polarized lenses in our percepts of language and science, sorting the elements of linguist and scientific rationality that fail to fit in t he confines of rationality. And this application of excessively strict criteria for inclusion has lead to an ever-shrinking band of reason that has pushed progressively extensive domains of human practice and cognition into an unstructured slag heap of purportedly irrational phenomena. Most profound consequences are the distortion of any passable understanding of the significant and genuine function of rationality in Politics. That’s why it is quite essential for present-day political philosophy to discern that the last few decades have messed substantial improvements and alterations in the domains of philosophy that have straight impact upon the discernment of human reason. These modern philosophies were based on such assumptions that seemed to bring forth a pattern of vibrations among the neo-Kantian and utilitarian theories as each of them were not able to tackle the circumstances and situation in an adequate manner. Thus the deadlock existed in the discernment of practica l reason seemed to converge with the ethical quandary of liberal democratic theory converge at this point. The authority of the conniving model of reason has constructed a theory of combined prudence unmanageable if not inconceivable. But the most plausible and attractive way of justifying and understanding the liberal democratic exercises is to interpret them as an effort to substantiate the norms of joint prudence so as to consider liberal democracy in terms of a community of individuals who

Defend the position that Plato takes that philosophers should be Essay

Defend the position that Plato takes that philosophers should be rulers, or the contrary, that rulers should not be philosophers - Essay Example Democracy in Athens has been full of individualism and political selfishness. In addition, most people living in Athens captured governmental jobs for their own self-centered reasons and finally divided the city into two hostile groups of the rich and poor. The other group formed was that of the oppressor and the oppressed. Conversely, Plato’s philosophy on virtue and justice greatly impacted democracy. Plato’s viewpoints provided a well-known place to the notion of justice. He was not happy with the existing decaying conditions in Athens. A number of his attacks majorly criticized the unpaid meddlesomeness and extreme uniqueness. He criticized the system of government through the creation of an ideal society where justice was embraced in all the activities within the city. This is because Plato had discovered that the problems in this context could only be treated by ensuring that people are treated equally and with a lot of justice. It is important to note that there had been a number of hypotheses of justice before Plato came into the limelight. Therefore, he had to reject the theories. For instance, he did not support the traditional theory of justice since he believed that justice was about saying the truth and settling one’s debt. According to Plato, the theories which were presented by Cephalus, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon had a common element. They handled justice an achievement, importation, or convention. Therefore, he was able to verify that justice is not based on chance, togetherness, or external forces. He was able to provide different meaning of justice hence people could easily understand what he meant. For instance, the people living in Athens accepted that justice cannot be obtained without three elements (reason, spirit, and appetite). Democracy also prevailed after people had realized that their souls operated without affecting other elements in the body. There are also three categories of the social organism-philosopher