Jacques-Yves Cousteau

What follows, are various views, stated by notable people, to expose the reader to various definitions of civilization, as each person, provides different weight on the various aspects and tenets of civilization. The Marquis Mirabeau, in 1757, seems to be the first to use the word civilization. At the time, the word civilization for him and philosophers of the Enlightenment had a narrower meaning than today. “It denoted humane laws, limitations on war, a high level of purpose and conduct,…

Social Contract – Hobbes, Locke, RousseauAfter reading the three social contractarians, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is clear they each have different views on how to define a legitimate government, how to obtain one, what human nature is, and the social contract theory itself. The state of nature is a theoretical state in which there is no government formed yet. Each author speaks on how he believes humans interact or act individually in this state. The social…

Human well-being defined, is a state where the pursuit of life, liberty, and property is unhindered. It is when people within a society are free to do as they like, as long as they do not harm others. According to this definition of human well-being, the philosophies of John Stuart Mill prove to be more important in the preservation of this state. The prohibition of individual liberties, proposed by Mill, seem to be more of a threat to human well-being than the economic conditions described by…

Locke and Rousseau contract greatly regarding inequality. Their theories present different origins of inequality, different notions of whether people agree to it, and different ways in which it should be regulated by political society. According to Locke, there is no limitation on the inequality that may exist within a government. To question his theory, let us assume the following conditions: 1. The legislature legislates according to the best interest of its citizens. 2. The government…

Starting off, they each had a distinctive understanding of human nature from one another. To Rousseau, humans in primitive times were "noble savages" and it is "civilization" that turned man into a "beast". Conversely, Hobbes believed that being "civilized" is a positive trait and being uncivilized or a "savage" is bad. Concerning human nature, Rousseau theorized that humans were innately good and generous, before being corrupted by the vices of civilization. Human life was most likely peaceful…

Choices (Draft) All humans are created equally and are born with free will. Every person has the natural right to be the author of their life, meaning that they can make their own choices and pursue their dreams. Nevertheless, humans bent nature to their will by adopting slavery, a practice in which humans are owned and are brutally forced to work. In the excerpt “Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass masters the literacy skills he needed to fulfill his role as an…

The most popular writer with regards in postmodernity, is Jean-Francois Lyotard, he primarily define the term postmodernity as a contemporary condition that we live and champions the forms of resistance and critics. Lyotard believed that, in a postmodernity period, there is a question regarding the sense of the ownership. Who controls the flow of an idea from one person to another and who has access to their ideas. With that, the person became a consumer of knowledge that can transform into a…

People like to believe they have control over their own decisions; however, all decisions and all actions are taken under a system of laws and moral and cultural codes ingrain into everyone since childhood. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, he notes that state of nature is where everyone is free and at peace, but as population grows and people’s needs changes, humans starts to group themselves together, loosing that freedom. Socially, one must lose their individual freedom for…

Montaigne is the author of the argumentative piece, “Of Cannibals.” He was an influential philosopher, skeptical of the society his race had fabricated. Essentially, He was a Frenchman who lived in the sixteenth century and questioned its modernistic practices. He believed man buried their true instincts under what a manufactured society deemed important: organized religion, money, and art, but it was these “savages” Montaigne mentioned that, he believed, embraced their natural impulses.…

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke were both philosophers that influenced the Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries. During this time both Rousseau and Locke created and outlined specific concepts of man, and how man lives his life in society; in doing this, both Rousseau and Locke defined different ideas of property and its purpose in society. Using the texts of Rousseau and Locke, and each philosopher’s divergent definitions of property, laws, and government it is possible to…