Knowledge, nature and political authority

Part 4 · Knowledge, freedom and a changing world

What makes a belief worth accepting, or a government’s power legitimate? Both questions ask for reasons, though answering one does not settle the other. We follow them through a selection of early modern European debates.

The first four lessons examine doubt, substance, experience and causation. The next three turn to government, inequality, a common will and the people left out of claims to universal rights. Throughout, earlier questions about evidence and recognition help us assess these arguments. The next module takes up reason, freedom and social life, and the final part of the course returns to knowledge and justice through particular problems.

Time, place and approach. These seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European arguments overlap in time with the readings of the preceding module. Calling them early modern names a regional setting, not a stage that every philosophical tradition must pass through, and their importance does not make them the universal beginning of modernity. We also need to examine the steps between a theory of knowledge and any political conclusions drawn from it.

After these lessons

• Reconstruct a challenge to a belief about the external world or causation.
• Explain a proposed justification of government and a difficulty it faces.
• Identify a gap between the scope of a rights claim and the people it includes.

Useful preparation

The linked lessons on skepticism, causation and recognition under colonial rule give useful background; review them as needed. Each new reading introduces its central problem and explains the argument you will be considering.

• Review: What if inquiry does not settle the dispute?
• Review: What can reason establish about causation?
• Review: Who is recognized as fully human?