Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Public Life, John Dewey, and Media Technology

Hans Lenk and Ulrich Arnswald use John Dewey’s distinction between public and private life to consider some implications of information technology.

The first philosophical conception of the public, and of public life in contrast to private life, came into being in the first community of free citizens, democratic ancient Athens. Plato’s works the Republic, Statesman and Laws focused on the criteria for and differences between ‘private’ and ‘public’. Later, in Rome, Cicero took up the concept of the res publica (‘public matters’) from his translation of Plato’s Republic to highlight the congruence between consciously-enacted decision-making according to one’s own will and the laws of a city state. Cicero tried to emphasize not only the familial aspects of human beings (think of the pater familias), but also the public aspects. In a way, he is the first propagator of what can be called homo publicus (‘public man’), whom he sketched out following Plato’s idea of the free-born citizen as expressed in the Republic.

…