My Seminar Paper

Sorry it's a bit late and sorry it's a bit rubbish but I was asked by a few people to upload my seminar paper onto the blog and here it is...

Machiavelli is the figure that we have studied so far that interests me the most so for that reason he will be the focus of my seminar paper. This does not mean however that I will ignore the rest of the subjects we have read about. For example I will not be able to ignore the Italian Renaissance because of its relationship to Machiavelli and its huge importance to our study. I also will not be able to ignore the likes of Descartes and also The Scientific Revolution. The importance of the work of Descartes and the Scientists like Galileo et al cannot be overstated. They are the founders of our modern philosophy and science respectively and so whilst Machiavelli may be my main interest in this paper, I will not allow myself to become too distracted by him.

Machiavelli is thought by many to be the beginning of political science and philosophy. He lived in the time of the Renaissance and so his influence on that period is huge. His alliances with some leaders (Caesar Borgia), and his feuds with others (The Medici’s), are what made Machiavelli such an interesting character to study. At times in his life Machiavelli was a diplomat in Florence, one of the many separate states that made up Italy. He was representative of the Southern Renaissance Humanism that ran through this period of history but his theories and ideas laid down in his most famous work The Prince still seem incredibly modern. The Prince was written in the hope of securing the favour of The Medici family but its claims were actually quite provocative. The main point made is that you should secure power by any means, something that many would do but the stark realism in his suggestion of acquiring power by any means necessary would be quite shocking to some. On doing some more research into Machiavelli his professional relationship to Caesar Borgia is quite an interesting one considering that some of the correspondences he sent back to Florence from the court of Caesar Borgia still survive today in Machiavelli’s collected works. Caesar Borgia was an important figure in the time of Machiavelli and had influence across the Renaissance period due to his father being the Pope in the time, one of the most controversial Popes of the renaissance era. Machiavelli writes about Pope Alexander VI in The Prince as a successful politician but as the term Machiavellian came into usage as a pejorative term after this book, so it could possibly be a backhanded compliment.

In The Prince, the ‘how to’ guide for leaders, Machiavelli lays down some main rules: Firstly that you should support the weaker side in any conflict, this is so that when you prevail together with them, you will be the most powerful. Secondly, centralised regimes are difficult to conquer but easy to hold. Lastly that Armed prophets always succeed but unarmed ones fail. In The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell notes that Machiavelli puts prophets like Moses in the armed category and someone like Savonarola of whom Machiavelli would know very much, into the latter category. Here is a quote illustrating that point from Machiavelli’s The Prince, “If Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus had been unarmed they could not have enforced their constitutions for long — as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer, and he had no means of keeping steadfast those who believed or of making the unbelievers to believe”. The problem in this is that Machiavelli also asked you to be feared and not loved, because “it is better to be feared than loved, for love is fickle but fear is constant”. How do you become feared though without being hated? Well Machiavelli had an answer for that as well, as cunning and ‘Machiavellian’ in the negative sense as you can get. The answer to the question is that you must never take someone’s property. Kill people if you have to but with good reason but never take someone’s property “for men forget the death of their fathers more easily than the loss of their inheritance”. You can refer this back to Caesar Borgia who used a tactic just as clever to keep the favour of the public whilst keeping his power. “If you are going to take power by villainy – it is best to do it all at once, and get someone else to do it”, the example given in the lecture was that of Caesar Borgia’s governor who Borgia had to do all the things that would make Borgia himself unpopular. Once Borgia had power he killed the governor for the public to see and so had power and was feared but was more popular than ever.

I think I have talked about Machiavelli for long enough and of course if you wanted to know more there are extensive notes on him across the internet, in the library and reading The Prince itself would probably not hurt. Just before I move on however there is something interesting that I found whilst researching Machiavelli that The Prince has been read by some as a Political Satire. Admittedly I found this information on the internet and more specifically Wikipedia so there is no certainty that it is true on a free to edit website but it does have information to back it up.

The contribution of the early scientists like Galileo and Kepel and even earlier figures such as Copernicus, (who according to Russell is too early to be part of the ‘Rise of Science’) is huge on the development of the world, (without Galileo would we have Newton and then no laws of motion) but I did find it difficult to understand its relation to philosophy. In some ways it is the natural progression of philosophy, instead of just thinking about the world you are actually testing and evaluating these theories. Even with this in mind, it is still an important part of history and an interesting part of history to study. This becomes even more relevant when you consider that Galileo himself claimed he was merely following Pythagoras’s ideas that “nature [is] the book of God and it is written in the language of mathematics”. His claim is that he is uncovering God’s will through mathematics in this ‘new priesthood’ of Science.

I’m not sure how long seminar papers are supposed to go on for, in fact I’m not sure if this has really been a seminar paper, but I’m going to end this now with a few thoughts on Descartes. Descartes began as a contemporary of Galileo, believing that the universe could be explained by mathematics. His most repeated idea “I think therefore I am” lead to the idealist philosophy of someone like Hegel. Descartes is one of the most important philosophers as he took philosophy into the modern age, eventually leading on to thoughts of Berkeley and Hegel who believed that everything came from the ego. This came from Descartes total certainty of his own thoughts and his existence. Thanks for listening to my poorly constructed and confusing seminar paper.

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