(in Polish) Literature and the Philosophy of Law

elective monographs
general courses

Classroom

This lecture series will demonstrate the power of great literature to serve as a source of legal and political philosophy. The chief works used for the seminar series shall be Hamlet and King Lear, by William Shakespeare, as well as Euripides’ Medea, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, and Sophocles’ Ajax. All texts will be used in English, or in English translation. Although literature will serve as the source, all major themes of ancient and modern political and legal philosophy will be touched upon. Standard readings in political philosophy will be made use of on an ad-hoc basis (e.g., Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, et al.). Contemporary and historical discussions in Anglo-American and Continental jurisprudence will be addressed wherever relevant.

This lecture series will demonstrate the power of great literature to serve as a source of legal and political philosophy. The chief works used for the seminar series shall be Hamlet and King Lear, by William Shakespeare, as well as Euripides’ Medea, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, and Sophocles’ Ajax. All texts will be used in English, or in English translation. Although literature will serve as the source, all major themes of ancient and modern political and legal philosophy will be touched upon. Standard readings in political philosophy will be made use of on an ad-hoc basis (e.g., Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, et al.). Contemporary and historical discussions in Anglo-American and Continental jurisprudence will be addressed wherever relevant.

Example lecture topics:

Example lecture number 1 – Agamemnon, pt. 1 of The Oresteia.

Theme: Greek theatre and the performative aspects of personhood

This seminar will introduce the world that Aeschylus presents in The Oresteia. The text as a piece of literature, which was originally experienced as a dramatic performance, will be connected to the concept of the person. Persons, too, have a performative and representational aspect. The performative aspect involves all that the person can say or do privately or publicly. The representational aspect involves the ways in which human persons can be constructed or recognized socially, legally, philosophically, religiously, and culturally. Agamemnon will serve as the person par excellence in this study.

Example lecture nr. 2 – The Libation Bearers, pt. 2 of The Oresteia.

Theme: Determinism & personal moral responsibility

This seminar will take seriously the deterministic character of Orestes’ predicament. He, like many modern humans, would seem to find himself in a place without the possibility realistically to do otherwise; in his case, he must kill his mother. However, in the world of the Greeks matricide should result in the death penalty, being one of the most morally reprehensible and legally pursuable deeds. Part of the freedom of persons, morally and legally, is their not being inevitably bound by necessity. Is personhood possible where some forms of determinism reign? Can we speak about gradations of personhood in the way we may speak about gradations of moral responsibility? Or is ‘person’ an either/or concept (i.e. either a person or a thing)? Are there different ways we may answer those questions when speaking about legal persons, philosophical persons, our own personhood, or regarding characters in literature (fictitious persons)? Orestes will serve as the ‘person in question’ for this philosophical enquiry.

Example lecture nr. 3 – The Kindly Ones, pt. 3 of The Oresteia.

Theme: Public legality & private morality

Contemporary ideas of a ‘right to privacy’ follow after a long train of conceptual development of the rights and duties of persons. There is an assumption that our public and private existence are divisible into spheres of life and action: in public the law is sovereign; in private the individual person is sovereign. Such an assumption was not shared by the ancients (even if some intimations of that assumption do emerge during the trial of Orestes in the third play of The Oresteia). The broad division of public law and private law, and both of them from any necessary connection to private moral considerations, is hinted at in the outcome of Orestes’ case. He killed his mother ‘not without justice’ – a puzzling phrase in the context in which it is presented. The question becomes: Whose justice is relevant? And why? The Oresteia provides us with one solution to competing visions of justice – the Athenian settlement of the Areopagus, publicly-promulgated law, and a jury system – all bearing some deference to the gods. What other possibilities might there be to reconcile the seemingly conflicting demands of justice that this play presents us with?

1. The Oresteia, Aeschylus. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (translator), University of California Press. ISBN: 978-0520083288; or: Gerald Duckworth & Co. ISBN: 978-0715616833

2. Medea by Euripides

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35451/35451-h/35451-h.htm

3. Sophocles, ‘Ajax’

o https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/sophocles/ajax.htm

4. William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’

o http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1524

5. William Shakespeare, ‘King Lear’

o http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1128

Knowledge:

After a course student has knowledge about:

- philosophical methods and their relations to literature

- basic theoretical and philosophical problems in the field of Greek understandings of personhood, law and the social function of poetical literature in the political community, as well as how these differ from early modern and modern notions.

- basic categories of political, legal and ethical discourse, their relations to determinism & personal moral responsibility

Abilities:

After the course, the student can:

- find political and legal elements in great literature

- indicate historical conditions for contemporary ideas, such as, the ‘right to privacy’

- analyze the theoretical, normative and historical dimension of tragedy using the concepts of political and legal philosophy

- recognize the philosophical dimension of competing ancient and modern visions of justice

- analyze arguments about the subject of tragedy

- prepare arguments on a relevant subject, and is able to defend his/her own argument

- creatively use philosophical and methodological knowledge by formulating hypotheses and creating critical arguments

- formulate and re-construct arguments taken from different philosophical perspectives, while being aware of the differences and similarities between these perspectives

Social competence:

After the course, the student:

- has a more open attitude towards various options and opinions within ethics, political philosophy, and literature

- has a critical distance to the problems and the way they are formulated in literary texts

- takes and initiates research activities

- is reliable, considerate, and engaged in planning and proceeding in research activities

- has deeper understanding and sensitivity for different tragical components of cultural phenomena

- is fully aware of the value and philosophical importance of tragedy.

final written test