PHILOSOPHY PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS

In this research, chapter 1 provides the background to the study. This includes introduction, methodology, aims and objectives of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the biography of Cardinal Okogie and his priestly life. Chapter 3 highlights his different responsibilities and functions as a priest, bishop and cardinal. Chapter 4 deals with Cardinal Okogie’s stand on Ecumenism, charismatic movement, politics and other Christian denomination. Chapter 5 summarizes and concludes the entire study.

The concept of a person held by a group of people is fundamental in understanding not only how a person within such framework of thought views himself but also how other matters such as the idea of being, morality, knowledge and truth that are essential for the ordering of the society are viewed. This is emphasized by the fact that such a concept encapsulates the role the society expects the individual to play for the attainment of an orderly society and this makes it inevitable for African Scholars to write on the conception of a person from the Africans perspectives.

The entire work is arranged into five chapters. It employs the following methods: expository, analytical, comparative, review, critical and evaluative methods. However, the method that appears to dominate the work is the critical method. Chapter one deals with the explanation and analysis of Machiavellianism, the political ideology and background to the political theory of Machiavelli. In chapter two, the views of some philosophers are discussed together with Machiavelli’s idea of morality. Chapter three exposes Nigerian situation and Machiavelli’s influence on her. Chapter four analyzes critically Machiavellianism and Nigerian government together with the effects of Machiavellianism in Nigeria. While chapter five, which is the last chapter, contains the evaluation and conclusion.

The term Priesthood is one of the oldest institutions of mankind all over the world. The reason is certainly associated with the religious propensities of man. Man is however religious by nature, “Homo Religiosus”. Man’s preoccupation with Sacred, which Rudolf Otto described as… “A mystery inexpressible and above creatures”1. Mysterium tremendium. – a mystery which attract and repels, must have accelerated the growth of priesthood in human society. So many social scientists are not deluded in classifying religion as one of the five social institutions of mankind

As earlier stated, social contract theory has been used by many philosophers in various ways. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke also saw it from different perspectives to a certain level. Hobbes, the first to give its full exposition and defence postulates that social contract is an agreement to which the people surrender their will, freedom, and power to an absolute sovereign called the Leviathan. In his words …Thomas Hobbes saw the contract as one in which the citizens relinquish their freedom inherent in the state of nature to an absolute sovereign.

Principles of justice are the principles that rational and free persons that are concerned to further their interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining fundamentals of the term of their association.4 In his book, ‘A Theory of Justice’, like Plato, Rawls imagines a political society structured on principles of justice, a just society where nobody complains of injustice, a society governed by principles of justice. From the above, John Rawls came up with his own idea of a just society by providing two principles that can guide a society to attain the state of a just society. He did this by giving a theory of the people in the original position wearing a veil of ignorance that they would not be partial. One of John Rawls’ primary aim was to set forth the appropriate moral conception that was better suited to interpreting the democratic values of freedom and equality than the reigning utilitarian tradition.

One of the never ending processes in life is the process of knowledge acquisition which to the lay man may not constitute any problem as regards how it is acquired. But to philosophers, from time past this has constituted serious debacles. However, in philosophy, it has become the special concern of epistemology one of it’s branches to analyze how knowledge is acquired. Epistemology has rationalism and empiricism as its most outstanding schools. These two schools in analyzing how knowledge is acquired have come to be the opposite of each other, because while rationalism hold that knowledge comes through reason,empiricism on the other hand holds that it comes through sense-experience. In this long history of philosophy, however, David Hume has remained the most consistent empiricist and for some reasons, we deemed it necessary to make the aim of this work be the critical analysis of David Hume’s theory of empiricism so that in the end we would have demonstrated whether it exhausts all possible knowledge of reality or not. Now our problem is what must have led to Hume’s radical position that sense-experience is the only possible guide to the acquisition of knowledge that is certain? We however, discover that it is not unconnected to the fact that the search for knowledge that is certain, which Aristotle shifted to concrete objects through experimentation and which also cut through the time of John Locke and George Berkeley who laid emphasis on perception, influenced Hum

The fourth book to be reviewed, is Philosophy Made Simple by Richard H.P.Here it was understood that since sovereignty is created by a covenant or contract, the subject retains all those natural rights that cannot be transferred by covenant5 To put it differently, since the subject has entered into the contract to preserve and protect his life, the subject cannot refuse to obey the sovereign. The fifth book to be reviewed ,is Ethics: A Systematic and Historical Study by Joseph Omoregbe. Here Hobbes argues that men decided to come together and form an organized society since life was so in secured in the state of nature. They came together, made a social contract, empowered the sovereign to decide what should be done and what should not be done in the society.

This study is significant in the sense that it emphasizes the wider breath of Hobbes conception of the leviathan. His intention is to capture all areas of life with an attempt of reconstructing the society into a better one by proffering the Leviathan. Effort will be made to review and apply his concept of the Leviathan in examining the view of human nature as egoistic and individualistic and how we can evolve a stable and viable society from such a human nature.

The social contract theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that person’s moral or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement between them to form a society.1 On the mention of the term contract, then, what comes to mind immediately is agreement. The New Webster Dictionary of the English Language defined the term ‘contract’ as “an agreement or a covenant”.2 On the other hand, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines social contract as a basis for legitimate legal and political power in the idea of a contract. Contracts are things that create obligation.”3 Hence, if we can view society as organized, i.e., a situation where a contract had been formed between the citizen and the sovereign power, this would necessarily ground the obligation of each to the other. The idea is one of a contract between citizens as a result of which power is vested in government.