Raffaella Santi

In the Footsteps of the Stoics: Teaching Local and Global Citizenship in Northern Ireland

Contemporary Northern Ireland is a divided society “in transition”, in the aftermath of a conflict that lasted thirty years. The school system is mainly separated, with a minority of “integrated schools” (63 to date), mixed schools with protestant and catholic pupils - only seven pupils in one hundred attend this type of schools. In this context, teachers and educational researchers have developed some interesting inclusive practices. The article explores the most recent developments in the Northern Irish education system, highlighting the new vision of “shared education”, with programmes of meeting and collaboration among different schools, which is – at least at a political level – supplanting the view of “integrated education”. It also considers the programme for “Local and Global Citizenship” (LGC) in compulsory education, and its potential for the construction of lasting peace and social change, especially if connected to the teaching of philosophy and the use of philosophical enquiry in the classroom. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.3.5

Legal Thought in Early Modern England: The Theory of Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1588-1679) is one of the most influential British philosophers of the seventeenth century. The paper reconstructs Hobbes’s legal theory, focusing on his definition of law (civil law, as he calls it) found in Leviathan, XXVI, 3. The definition is only apparently simple, since it has been interpreted in different ways, especially with regard to the connections with natural law—and the Hobbesian assertion that civil law and natural law “contain each other”. Moreover, the definition of civil law changes in the corresponding paragraph of the Latin version of 1668. What is the meaning of this change? What about the divisions of the law/divisio legis, which—as Hobbes emphasizes—appears in different forms in different writers? Finally, if a good law is “that which is needful, for the good of the people”, what is it that dictates the paths to be followed by the sovereign representative, who is also the supreme legislator, when writing a new law? These are the main problems in Hobbes’s legal thought that the paper will address.