A Companion to Public Philosophy

14Public Philosophy and Deliberative Practices

NOËLLE McAFEE

Introduction

This chapter explores the relationship between public philosophy and deliberative democracy, both at a broad philosophical level and more granularly at the forms of deliberative practice that political theorists and philosophers have embraced and tried to foster.

1 The Co‐emergence of Philosophy and Politics

As Cornelius Castoriadis and others have noted, in Greece, the birth of democracy coincided with the birth of philosophy. In and around the city‐state of Athens early in the fifth century BCE, Greeks began reflecting on, questioning, and deciding not only what is – that is, the nature of reality (philosophy) – but what should be (politics). As Castoriadis notes, instead of deferring to myth or “the nature of things – a physis,” they took it upon themselves to be the judge of matters philosophic and political (Castoriadis 2011, p. 93). This was a rupture, Castoriadis writes, with the old view that things were as they were beyond human intervention. The break takes form “starting from the moment when the philosophers began to demolish the mythological traditions and to search for a principle of truth and of reflection within their own activity of thinking” (Castoriadis 2011, p. 94). This break immediately extended into “the sphere of politics with democracy,” limited to be sure by old notions of slavery, but creating the germ of an idea that human beings were the ultimate arbiters of what was right ...