Students immerse themselves in the foundational works of classical Greek literature beginning with a study of the whole of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, followed by Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus, and works by Euripides and Aristophanes. Students consider the thoughts and actions of some of Greek literature’s greatest characters, and confront fundamental questions of human existence that still resonate today. What is the nature of Achilles’ rage? What makes possible the meeting between Achilles and Priam? What does “home” mean for Odysseus? How did the notion of justice develop over the course of the Oresteia and why? From what sort of blindness does Oedipus suffer? How do we understand Plato’s portrayal of Aristophanes in the Symposium, considering Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates in The Clouds?

Through close reading and analysis of some of the greatest English authors in history, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and other poets and prose writers, students will have the opportunity to explore the development and expression of the English language. These authors allow the exploration of various aspects of nature, human society, and the self. Authors both ancient and modern will challenge assumptions about experiences and help to seek more clarity into the fundamental questions that shape humankind.

By studying the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, among other texts, students follow a conversation spanning thousands of years about the nature of democracy, government, and society. Explore contrasting notions of the relationship between the individual and state, the motivations of human beings, and the “best” form of government.

What might it look like to organize political life to make the good life possible? This course begins with Aristotle’s formulation of the moral life in his Ethics, then moves to Aquinas’ Treatise on Law, then either Kant’s Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals or Montesquieu’s Treatise on Law. Students then turn to the development of the American experiment in democracy, first looking at the founding documents, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, finishing either with Lincoln’s speeches or essential Supreme Court cases.

Philosophy and theology both confront the most fundamental questions about the nature of being, the structure of the universe, and how we as humans can fit within it. In this class students will likely find that there is no bright line between faith and reason in these deepest of works: the Bible, Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. All deal with the question of God’s existence, but demand inquiry and thought.

Is knowledge possible? This fundamental question to human existence has been debated by thinkers ancient and modern. What is being? What is knowledge? How do we know the order of things? What place do humans have in it? This class begins with a close study of Plato’s Meno, followed by intensive work on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Descartes’s Meditations, Kant’s Prolegomena, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, among other works.

In this class, a variety of great classical historians are read, including Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Tacitus. Through the eyes of these authors, students witness the rise and fall of the empires of Athens and Rome, confronting questions such as: What is the connection between democracy and empire? How durable is the republican form of government? What precipitates change from one form of government to another? In addition, students consider the role of the individual in history, particularly through the lives of remarkable leaders of antiquity including Themistocles, Pericles, Alcibiades, Caesar, Cato, Augustus, and others.

In this class students consider the nature of historical thought itself. How do we determine what counts as history – what we write about, and why? Is there meaning in history and, if so, how might its meaning be revealed? Are we determined by the historical and cultural framework of our own times, and would that not limit what we can know? Is there development or progress in history? Does it have a shape, direction, or goal? Can we identify the forces that give rise and potentially shape to the movement of history? Students ask these and related questions through readings that include Augustine’s City of God, Vico’s New Science, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, and shorter writings by Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others.

This class considers a series of texts which set forth different understandings of the enterprise of science, including what its goals, methods, and subject matter might be. When we speak of “natural science” what do we mean by “nature” and “science”? Do we wish to contemplate nature or to master it? How is the pursuit of scientific knowledge related to the pursuit of a good life for human beings? Can we know how to pursue scientific knowledge without presupposing understanding of its objects? Are questions about matter void, infinity, space, time, and motion questions that should be answered by science? Can the human soul be an object of natural science? These and other questions are raised by the texts of Lucretius, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Harvey, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Darwin, and Freud or Jung.

This study starts with Book I of the Elements, in which Euclid begins with a handful of definitions, postulates and common notions, and constructs from them an array of elegant plane figures. Students see how to construct these figures and how to ascertain equality and inequality among their parts and in their relationships with one another. The geometric understanding gained studying Euclid is then tested by the work of Lobachevsky who challenges Euclid’s postulate about parallel lines, changing the conditions under which lines do and do not intersect. This raises questions such as can there be more than one “true” geometry? Are both geometries imaginable? Is one or the other a more accurate “picture” of “real space”? The mathematical content of these works is accessible to the beginning student and requires no previous preparation or special mathematical aptitude. Yet these works have a beauty, subtlety, and power of raising fundamental questions which are a challenge and a pleasure even to those with considerable mathematical background and facility.

Two of Virginia Woolf’s greatest novels, To the Lighthouse and The Waves as well as her essay, A Room of One’s Own, are examined for the unique style of Woolf’s writing and the luminous descriptions she gives of both interior and exterior human worlds obscure the line between subject and object, between inner and outer, inviting us to face aspects of human experience and identity in radically new ways. Close readings of these works will allow students to dwell with her characters, discovering landscapes and storytelling that open mysteries in the texts.

Late in this epic tale of the world’s most famous knight errant, Don Quixote visits a publishing house and makes a comment about translation. He likens it to the wrong side of a piece of embroidery where the whole tangle of threads is visible. This story itself is a translation. Why? How does Cervantes want us to think of it? What are we meant to see on this underside of art? How does frequently drawing our attention to author, narrator, and translator, to the fact that the story is created, change how we see the story itself? In this class, students take time to pull on threads and see what happens. 

The justice system in America relies on the British “common law,” the name for an approach to law that develops legal and interpretive standards over time through the courts. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s 1881 book The Common Law is a classic of American jurisprudence, showing how the legal tradition of the common law grew and offering a judicial philosophy that has become embedded in American law. Holmes was later appointed to the United States Supreme Court where he became known as “the Great Dissenter,” most notably for his dissents in Freedom of Speech cases. In addition to The Common Law, this elective will read court cases authored by Holmes and others to reflect upon the nature of law and more particularly on the jurisprudence of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. 

Students examine the work of two American Presidents who are among humanity’s outstanding political philosophers through their essays, speeches, notes, and letters. From works many know by heart—The Declaration of Independence and The Gettysburg Address—to the practical wisdom of their common working papers, we consider two exemplars of leaders standing by their words.

Explore nine books of the Bible (Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel I and II, Kings I and II, Esther) that follow the history of the Hebrew people as they leave Mt. Sinai under Moses, wander the wilderness for forty years, battle their way into the promised land, rule themselves by judges and later by kings, and after 700 years find themselves captive to the Persians and threatened with destruction. Questions such as: “Who determines the authority of judges?”, “What does God require of the Israelites?”, and “How do we understand obedience and rebellion in the Book of Numbers?” will be explored. 

Arendt’s experience watching the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann led her to ask whether evil is thoughtlessness—a reliance on clichés in place of facts. “Could the habit of thinking as such be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” In this class, students explore Arendt’s philosophical writings on thinking. What are we doing and where are we when we think? Arendt explores these questions through the mind’s faculties of thinking, willing, and judging.

Shakespeare’s Roman Plays are notable examples of his craft as well as timely inquiries into the nature and fate of republican governments. This class will look closely at three plays. Coriolanus addresses the uneasy relationship between Aristotle’s “great-souled man” and the community of equals in the context of the early Roman Republic. In Julius Caesar, a version of this unresolved (unresolvable?) problem leads the Roman Republic into one-person rule and civil war. How do we distinguish between honorable ambition and dangerous demagoguery? Antony and Cleopatra depicts the fate of ambitious individuals in an empire, and the relationship of love to ambition. 

What is life? No other question in biology gets as much attention. Some argue that it is a profound question that is central to all biological thinking; others argue that it is not the right question to ask of the living world. This elective course will look to a series of thinkers and philosophers who have responded to the question (directly or indirectly) in a philosophical way. Read selections from Aristotle, Darwin, Goethe, Schrödinger, Jonas, Bergson, and Margulis. Questions focusing on modes of thinking and observation illuminate the living world and help students understand the forms that life appears to take. 

Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology are examined in their early forms through Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and Jung’s Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Freud’s lectures address parapraxes, dream analysis, theory of sexuality, analytic method, transference, and other central questions of Freud’s theory and method. Jung’s volume contains two large essays in which he discusses Freud, Adler, trauma, Eros theory, his own synthetic method as opposed to Freud’s more reductive analysis, countertransference: the notions of persona, shadow, anima and animus, and collective unconscious. What kind of a science is this new therapeutic psychology? It often happens that texts attempting to articulate the foundations of a new kind of inquiry reveal the human and philosophical questions underlying the new beginning in a way that is not accessible later once dogma settles down.