[SOLVED] Final Essay on Exploratory and Analytic Essay
This exam is one long (1,500 words) exploratory and analytical essay on what material you read and studied during the semester. I would like you to use Gramsci’s notion of a Philosophy of Praxis as being an active movement of thought and practice in the shaping of the world to engage at least 3 of the authors we encountered this past semester. Concentrate on those who affected you the most in changing your perspectives, your ideas, and the way of engaging the world you inhabit. Some limits you may write on: the theory of recollection in Plato’s Meno, the theory of Phronesis and the doctrine of the mean in Aristotle, method according to Descartes, power and fear in Machiavelli’s Prince, doing History differently in Marx, the idea of enlightenment according to Kant, Freud’s idea of religion as illusion, Dostoevski’s about free will and faith, and the idea of justice as a sham in Billy Budd. In general, how philosophy in its active form helps to transform the world and not only interpret it. This essay could be considered a long meditation on Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: “‘ Hitherto, philosophers have only interpreted the world : the point, however is to transform it.”
