Content (Syllabus outline):

The course lectures are – of course, within the given historical context - emphasizing fundamental concepts, its development, and the very appearance of the new ones. That means always concrete concepts and within the connection to concrete authors and theirs own times and circumstances. That si – as a method - still today of paramoung importance for all fundamental texts of western tradition at the level of the very possibility of theirs understandings and interpretations. The course is openning the very posibility for understanding exactly that western tradition, its peculiarites and - in that way -  also the posibilities for understanding another traditions.

Subjects of the course:

• First appearance of ethics and politics;  Socrates and Plato: world, philosophy and ethics
• Ethics and politics: Aristoteles' critique of Plato
• Aristoteles: Nichomach's Ethics
• Ethics and arete in peripathetic school
• First appearance of morality: Stoics and the world, kosmopolis, back to Socrates – beyond arete and Aristoteles: towards governance and leadership
• Anti-political morality of cosmopolites: social, moral being and virtu (Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch ) of leadership
• Morality and christian virtues: neo-scoicism, neo-platonism: Augustine (Aquinas) – Jesus as problem of the Leader (leadership)
• Protestant moral, virtu-revolution: back to the foundations - neo-stoicism and post-platonism, beyond christianity (Luther)
• Machiavelli: morality, anti-ethics and anti-politics – the problem of force, political technologiy and Monarch (Virtu & Fortuna). Introduction of Leader (il Principe)
• Spinoza: axioms(atisation) and geometrisation  of morality – scientific virtu of One
• From Kant to Hegel: neo-stoicism and scientific defense of »righteness« (Sittlichkeit)
• Nietzsche and Marx: re-evaluation of all values  - new morality and new values. Culture o fanti-politics and leadership
• MacIntyre and moral relativism of our times: beyond virtues – post-stocisims and revival of Aquinas