Philosophy of Leadership

3 credits · Undergraduate

What is leadership? Does leadership remain fundamentally the same when you change scale or purpose, or does it in some way become fundamentally different? What is good leadership? Are the virtues of leadership universal and unchanging, or are they relative to your historical circumstances? Who can be a leader? Can leadership be taught, or is it something you are born with? How do we gain knowledge about leadership? Can we learn leadership through logic, reasoning from fundamental ideas, or do we require experimentation and empirical evidence? These are some of the questions we will be investigating through the close reading of classic texts on the philosophy of leadership, such as Plato’s Statesman and Machiavelli’s The Prince.