Machiavelli's political thought and Machiavellianism.

In the late medieval period and the early Renaissance, Italy was in a bad situation. The country was being invaded by powerful foreign nation states such as France and Spain. Niccolo Machiavelli was born into this unstable time of shifting fortunes in the year 1469. He served in a number of minor government positions, and was banished or imprisoned at various points of his career.He formulated his own theory of effective government in a treatise known as "The Prince," and he based his ideal "Prince" on Cesare Borgia's life. In contrast, Machiavelli argued that the most successful kings were not the ones who acted according to dictates of law, or justice, or conscience, but those willing to do whatever was necessary to preserve their own power--and thus indirectly preserve the order of the state. Machiavellianism is the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct. Machiavellianism is also a term that some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person's tendency to be unemotional, and therefore able to detach him or herself from conventional morality and hence to deceive and manipulate others. Machiavellianism is one of the three personality traits referred to as the dark triad, along with narcissism and psychopathy. Some psychologists consider Machiavellianism to be essentially a subclinical form of psychopathy, although recent research suggests that while Machiavellianism and psychopathy overlap, they are distinct personality constructs. Machiavellianism has been found to be negatively correlated with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, two dimensions of the Big Five personality model. Machiavellianism has also been located within the interpersonal circumplex, which consists of the two independent dimensions of agency and communion.

• Aquinas life and teaching.Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar and priest and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian.Aquinas saw specific defferences between philosophy and theology-between reason and faith. For one thing, philosophy begins with the immediate objects of sense experience and reasons upward to more general conceptions until, as in Aristotle’s case, the mind fastens upon the highest principles or first causes of being, ending in the conception of God. Theology, on the other hand, begins with a faith in God and interprets all things as creatures of God. There is here a basic difference in method, since the philosopher draws his conclusions from his rational description of the essences of things, whereas the theologian rests the demonstration of his conclusions upon the authority of revealed knowledge.Aquinas formulated five proofs or ways of demonstrating the existence of God: proof from motion, proof from Efficient Cause, Proof from Necessary versus Possible Being, Proof from the Degrees of Perfection, and Proof from the Order of the Universe.

EXAM QUESTION #23

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1127