According to Protagoras and Rousseau, how was civil society first established?

Final ExaminationWrite a short essay on each of these topics:1)Compare the accounts of human nature (the state of nature) and of the origin of civil society given by Protagoras (in Plato’s Protagoras) and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality). In so doing you should address these questions: does Rousseau agree with Protagoras’s point that human beings are by nature deficient and weak? Do Protagoras and Rousseau agree on the reasons why human beings have come to live in society? According to Protagoras and Rousseau, how was civil society first established?2)In the first meditation of his Meditations on First Philosophy René Descartes calls into doubt all his opinions. What is the purpose of this doubt? (Explain what Descartes means when he points out that “the task in hand does not involve action but merely the acquisition of knowledge” (22)? For Descartes, what is the difference between knowledge and mere opinion? About what does he seek to acquire knowledge?) What are the opinions that Descartes calls into doubt by means of the Dream Argument? How does the Dream Argument call these opinions into doubt? What are the opinions that Descartes calls into doubt by means of the “long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am” (21)? How does the assumption of an omnipotent God call these opinions into doubt? (In the First Meditation, does Descartes claim to know that there is an omnipotent God who made him?) According to the second meditation, what is the first belief Descartes claims he cannot doubt? Why can’t he doubt it?3)In On Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes the following: “I therefore call every state ruled by laws a republic, regardless of the form its administration may take” (179). Explain what Rousseau means by a republic: Why is the republic the “form of association […] by means of which each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before” (164). What is the role of law in the republic? In what sense is each member in the republic “as free as before” (i.e., as free as in the original state of nature)? In a republic, why does a subject who obeys the government obey only himself? In what sense is there equality in the republic? How is the equality in the republic related to the equality in the original state of nature?

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