Commitment
sort by: Relevancy | Title | Rating try advanced search for more options
-
Welcome to Georgetown University Founded in 1789, Georgetown University is the nation's oldest Catholic and Jesuit university. Today, Georgetown is a major international research university that embodies its founding principles in the diversity of our students, faculty, and staff, our commitment to justice and the common good, our intellectual openness, and our international character. Georgetown is ranked No. 21 among national...more
-
This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.
-
The mature Rawls departed quite a bit from his earlier theory of justice, choosing instead an overlapping consensus, or political, not metaphysical approach. Professor Shapiro argues that this is a significant departure from the Enlightenment tradition. In a wrap-up of the class's examination of the Enlightenment, Professor Shapiro charts its evolution from Locke to Bentham to Mill to Marx to contemporary theorists. As for the...more
-
Edmund Burke was an English politician who wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France to express his disdain for the destructive havoc wrought by the French Revolution. As a traditionalist-conservative, he thinks about social change in a cautious and incremental way and characterizes the social contract as binding on those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Studying the anti-Enlightenment differs...more
-
Before exploring the three Enlightenment traditions in particular, Professor Shapiro examines the Enlightenment holistically, using John Locke as the foundation for the discussion. The first tenet of the Enlightenment is a commitment to science as a way of ordering politics, and Professor Shapiro introduces the Cartesian philosophy of science and segues into an elucidation of the workmanship ideal, a central feature of Enlightenment...more
-
One of the central questions in assessing Stalinism is whether or not the abuses of the latter were already present in the first years of the Russian Revolution. The archival evidence suggests that this is partly the case, and that even in its early stages Soviet Russia actively persecuted not just those who were believed to have profited unfairly, without laboring, but also non-Russian ethnic groups. Stalin, although not an ethnic...more
-
In the decades immediately following the French Revolution, Paris was at the center of a series of major developments in medical science, sometimes described as the transition from medieval to modern medicine. Although the innovations associated with the Paris School were in large part products of the ideological and institutional transformations brought on by the Revolution, they belong to a long list of challenges to the Galenic...more
-
Professor Shapiro transitions to the third and final section of the course, an in-depth look at democracy and its institutions. According to him, democracy is the most successful at delivering on the mature Enlightenment's twin promises to recognize individual rights as the ultimate political good and to base politics on some kind of commitment to objective knowledge. And interestingly, democracy as a tradition was not made famous by its...more
-
Michael Cline, Founding Partner at Accretive Technology Partners, suggests that when fundraising, the venture partner is much more important than the financial terms. However, Cline qualifies this advice by suggesting that you pick a venture partner much like you would want your daughter to pick a husband. Not only does the commitment, capability and integrity of the investing partner matter but so does your importance to and relationship...more
-
Dominic Orr, CEO of Aruba Networks, begins by describing two surprises he encountered when working with great people: first, how difficult it is for experienced people to change and second, how challenging it is to be intellectually honest. Orr then describes his efforts to overcome these impediments by cultivating a fast-decision making process focused on the facts and intellectual honesty. However, to achieve this environment each...more
-
Jason Green, Founding Partner at Emergence Capital, speaks on how to select a venture partner. Green emphasizes that selecting a VC is a long-term partnership commitment and encourages entrepreneurs to pay attention to four things when selecting a venture partner: 1) Negotiate from a position of strength, 2) Find shared belief, 3) Listen to your instincts and 4) Pay more attention to the partnership than the terms.
-
Robespierre's ascetic personal life and severe philosophy of political engagement are attributed by some to his difficult childhood. As a revolutionary, one of his most significant insights was that the Revolution was threatened not only by France's military adversaries abroad, but also by domestic counter-revolutionaries. Under this latter heading were gathered two major groups, urban mercantilists and rural peasants. Relative strength...more
