Political Science Professor Stephen Salkever Named Fellow of National Humanities Center

When searching for a method of theorizing politics that is sensitive to the rapidly changing cultural contexts of modernity, why have some contemporary philosophers returned to ancient Greece? Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Political Science Stephen Salkever will investigate that question as a fellow of the National Humanities Center for the 2007-08 academic year.

The NHC, an independent institute for advanced study in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, offers fellows the opportunity to devote themselves fully to research as members of a community of scholars engaged in similar enterprise. Salkever will spend the fall 2007 semester in residence at the center working on a book project titled "The Ethics and Politics of Natural Questions."

"I decided not to spend the whole year there," Salkever says, "because I'm anxious to get back to teaching. But I know that doing this research and thinking through these questions is necessary to my teaching at this stage."

During his residency at the NHC, Salkever will refine and focus a group of essays he has published about a return to careful interpretation of the work of Plato and Aristotle with an eye to present-day philosophical and practical questions. This re-examination of ancient Greek philosophy, Salkever says, is extraordinary in a discipline that has, from Hobbes onward, most often aimed to supersede earlier philosophers' efforts.

But the "Greek revival" Salkever posits is not simply a nostalgic rejection of modernity in favor of antiquity. It is, he argues, an alternative to "the predominant modes of modern moral and political philosophy, forms of Kantianism and deontology on the one hand and forms of Millian utilitarianism on the other."

"Contemporary political philosophy, whether for or against 'modernity,' whether attempting to transcend or to systematize the political tradition from which it emerges, understands its task as that of proposing principles or models of political life that are to be adopted as guides to political action. My project draws from Aristotle and Plato an alternative conception of the work of ‘practical' philosophy, one that draws together ethics and politics into a single complex inquiry," Salkever explains.

The appeal of Aristotle, who has been the primary focus of Salkever's own work in this area, and Plato, who has been similarly studied by others, is that their practical philosophy is "a preparation for self-inquiry, rather than a defense or explication of a principle," Salkever says.

"Aristotle's stress on questions itself reflects a definite sense of what human nature and human excellence or virtue is, a particular collection of tasks and abilities that, properly understood, suggests what I want to call natural questions, rather than natural laws or principles."

In this project, Salkever says, he follows the lead of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss, all students of Martin Heidegger who learned from Heidegger to read ancient philosophers for clues to interpreting contemporary society, but who rejected their teacher's view that it was necessary to transcend Plato and Aristotle. Instead, they sought to engage in conversation with the ancients.

Salkever, who studied under Strauss at the University of Chicago, rejects the recent identification of Strauss with neoconservatism in the popular press, noting that Strauss never pressured his students to adopt any particular political stance.

"What these students of Heideger all insist is that the theoretical guidance we need for good practice is not to be found in any single discourse or philosophical theory, but in our awareness of a continuous debate over the fundamental questions we confront, chief among them the question of how to distinguish a well-lived human life from a badly lived one."

In this tradition, Salkever proposes an approach with three elements:

• Critically interpreting the political culture of the present;
  
• Developing a set of questions that serve as a theoretical perspective from which to evaluate that culture; and
  
• Reflecting on the extent to which the theory it proposes can and cannot suggest ways of improving contemporary political life.

This flexible framework, Salkever argues, can accommodate a broad range of conditions, and "any practical philosophy that fails to undertake all of these three tasks must be considered inadequate."

In his book, Salkever proposes to bring Aristotle into dialogue with several currents in contemporary political philosophy, including those represented by Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, Charles Taylor and Jacques Derrida. He looks forward to engaging in dialogue with one of his own former students, Susan Bickford '85, an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Back to Bryn Mawr Now 5/17/2007

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