Sophocles: The Theban Plays

Charlie Barrett and Christopher Cohoon
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

In his Theban plays—Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, and Oedipus at Colonus—Sophocles presents a tragic vision of the primal knots that simultaneously animate and decimate the mythical house of Thebes. Written over a span of some forty years, these three free-standing plays do not constitute a trilogy. Yet we read them together not only because they traverse a single familial catastrophe, but also because they reveal Sophocles’s evolving tragic perspective—from the willful clash between Antigone and her uncle Creon, to King Oedipus’s unwitting auto-manhunt, to the mysterious, transhuman death of the aged Oedipus, not at home in Thebes but in the Athenian deme of Colonus. Tragic playwrights were known to ancient Athenians as didaskaloi (educators). What might we learn from the Theban tragedies—from their extreme forms of irony, horror, love? And if the great tragic principle, as articulated by Sophocles’s predecessor, Aeschylus, is pathei mathos (learning through suffering), what sort of suffering might our own learning require?

Text: Sophocles, The Theban Plays (tr. Ruby Blondell). Focus, ISBN 978-1585100378

Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg Tales

Grant Franks and Eric Salem
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

The Petersburg Tales, by Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol, stand at the intersection of two forms of writing: the folk tale, which Gogol loved and popularized, and the modernist and experimental tradition, of which he is a forerunner. The stories combine the magic and sentimentality of the one with the complexity and irony of the other to create an end product that is comic but also unsettling. They vary significantly in tone and genre, from the utter absurdism of “The Nose” to the stark realism of “Nevsky Prospect,” but share common themes that illuminate each other, like ineffective struggle and status. The collection’s sly humor and formal inventiveness reward serious exploration and discussion.

Text: Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). Vintage, ISBN 978-0375706158

Women Writing the Self

Leah Lasell and Rebekah Spearman
2–4 p.m. MDT 
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

What does it mean to write as an “I”? Is the self something that can be captured and transmuted into a text? Is all writing about the self the same? Can we find a whole self in Sappho’s fragments or Sei Shonagon’s jewel-like disjointed memories of Heian Japan? Do Lady Hyegyong’s memoirs of 18th-century Korea written over the course of a lifetime offer a clearer picture of a written self? Reading women from three very different locations and periods, spanning a number of genres and styles, we dive into the question of what a self is and what we do when we write about ourselves.

Texts:

• Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book (tr. Meredith McKinney). Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0140448061
• JaHyun Kim Haboush, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong (tr.  JaHyun Kim Haboush). University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520280489
• A manual will be provided.

Emerson’s Essays

J. Walter Sterling and David Townsend
10 a.m.­–Noon MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays are fundamental texts for understanding the truth and power of the American Experiment. His creative, profound, and grounded vision of both individual and community is scientific, tough-minded, and uplifting. He challenges our courage and our spirit. A deep original thinker with a beautiful poetic style, Emerson elevates, enlivens, and gives us a way of hope and love for the present and future.  

We begin with Nature, (1836), his first slim yet transformative book, mapping how we may live best in household Earth. “Our age is retrospective... Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe, a poetry and philosophy of insight... a religion of revelation to us?” On the foundation of Nature, we think through his Divinity School Address that got him banned at Harvard, his “American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience.” Let us consider together how to be a truly American Scholar.

Text: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures. Library of America, ISBN 978-0940450158

On the Tip of the Nose: Literary Pathways Towards the Science and Philosophy of Smell

David Carl and Paola Villa
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Why are odors and flavors so difficult to articulate in our language? Does olfaction lack a proper cognitive foundation in our culture? Are perfumes destined to become an illegible, mute alphabet “for the noseless man of the future,” as Italo Calvino puts it in his short story “The Name, The Nose”? Is there hope for our noses? This class aims to  explore these and other fragrant questions with our minds, but also with our “two senses of smell”— orthonasal (sniffing) and retronasal (from the mouth to the nose while eating). It is an open invitation to all those who believe that the unexamined odor is not worth sniffing and want to accept the challenges that smells and aromas offer to our philosophical preconceptions. As we read Calvino’s short stories from the collection Under the Jaguar Sun and a few excerpts from A.S. Barwich’s Smellosophy, we strive to make the “invisible world of olfactory information” intelligible and to educate our noses to pay attention.

Texts: 

• A.S. Barwich, Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind. Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0674278721

• A manual will be provided with Italo Calvino’s short stories.

Dante’s Paradiso

Judith Adam and Louis Petrich
3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

In this seminar, participants experience what heaven is like, according to Dante, who visited there under the guidance of his beloved, Beatrice. The visit is told in transcendent poetry in Volume III of Dante’s three-volume epic, The Divine Comedy. Dante’s images of heaven have left a permanent mark on readers everywhere. Even non-believers have felt that their human souls are capaciously oriented toward a state of blessedness, in which all sorrows that ever have been felt are redeemed by the spiritual virtues: faith, hope, and especially love. The poetry is experiential theology, humanly presented in the voices of sainted Christians and visually stunning in ways one would not have thought possible.

Text: Dante, Paradiso (tr. Robert Hollander). Anchor Books, ISBN 978-1400031153

The Bhagavad Gita within the Mahābhārata

Patricia Greer and David Townsend
3–5 p.m. EDT / 1–3 p.m. MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

The Bhagavad Gita, “The Song of the Lord,” is the best known and most beloved of India’s sacred texts. This profound teaching arises from the warrior Arjuna’s acute dilemma: Must he lead his troops into battle against beloved members of his own family? Should he fight? “Woe! We have resolved to commit a great crime as we stand ready to kill family out of greed for kingship and pleasures,” Arjuna cries to Lord Krishna, his best friend, exemplar, and charioteer. Krishna’s answer to Arjuna’s impasse is his sacred song. We read the Bhagavad Gita within the context of the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, in which it is embedded.

Texts: The Bhagavadgita in the Mahābhārata (tr. and ed. J. A. B. van Buitenen). University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226846620

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

Michael Grenke and April Olsen
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

“A never writer to an ever reader”—so begins the preface of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. The play is set during the Trojan War and is centered on the romance between Troilus, a Trojan prince, and Cressida, the daughter of a Trojan traitor. Though Troilus is named only once in the Iliad, and Cressida is never mentioned, Shakespeare (and Chaucer before him) makes them the main characters of the drama. In addition, the audience is given re-presentations of many other figures from Homer’s epic: Achilles, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Hector, Aeneas, Paris, Pandarus, and even Thersites. Familiarity with these Homeric heroes is not a prerequisite, but it would greatly enhance an encounter with Troilus and Cressida.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (The Pelican Shakespeare). Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0143131755

Each seminar topic has two sessions per day

Beyond Numbers: Set Theory

Mahmoud Jalloh and Peter Pesic
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 4–6 p.m. EDT / 2–4 p.m. MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

Are numbers the true foundation of mathematics? Or are there still more fundamental concepts from which numbers emerge? The most important modern candidate for this role is set theory. Using Paul Halmos’s classic exposition, Naive Set Theory, we discuss what it would mean to reconceive math in terms of sets. No prior mathematical study is presupposed; indeed, set theory is the basis of the “new math” midcentury mathematicians hoped would give children a grounding in the radical concepts and ways of thinking that have reshaped modern math over the past century. What are the powers and insights that sets allow? What is their value and conceptual price?

Texts: Paul R. Halmos, Naive Set Theory. Dover, ISBN 978-0486814872

A Week with Thinking Machines

Halley Barnet and Brendon Lasell
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

In the Discourse on Method, Descartes famously predicated our existence as human beings on our ability to think: “I think therefore I am.” He went on to argue that no matter the sophistication of our mechanical imitations of man, they would forever fall short of the capacity to reason. An astute observer of recent developments in artificial intelligence might be tempted to conclude that Descartes was mistaken, that we have indeed succeeded in creating machines that can reason and think.

Our seminar studies the nature of the thinking machine. Together, we read philosophical and scientific texts from the past three centuries that have investigated and proposed machines that represent, model, and even simulate human thought—from Pascal’s calculator to ChatGPT. Texts include Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream, Menebrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage,” and Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

Text: A manual will be provided.

Du Châtelet’s Foundations of Physics

Mahmoud Jalloh and Paola Villa
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise Du Châtelet-Lomont was one of the foremost scientists of her day. She is also at the center of contemporary efforts to recover the works of early women scientists. Famous both as the intellectual partner and lover of Voltaire as well as the sole French translator of Newton’s Principia, her work is of interest both in connection to the intellectual currents of her time and in its own right. Our seminar focuses on her ground breaking treatise, Foundations of Physics, which provides the philosophical foundations for the Newtonian worldview. The class includes a lab component on some relevant experiments, mathematical propositions, and related works that were of great influence on Du Châtelet, including Newton, Leibniz, and Huygens. No prior knowledge of physics, philosophy, or mathematics is assumed.

Texts:

• Emilie Du Châtelet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings (ed. Judith P. Zinsser). University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226168074
• A manual will also be provided.

Vector Space: The Crux of Modern Science

Peter Pesic and Kenneth Wolfe
10 a.m.–Noon MDT and 2–4 p.m. MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Vector space has long been one of the most important basic concepts of modern math, which we study through a slow reading of a short (but dense text by the great mathematician Hermann Weyl, aided by careful notes. A century ago, John von Neumann and his mentor, Weyl, taught physicists to use vector space as the central arena of quantum theory—“Hilbert space”—as we explore in simple examples, and time permitting,  consider the significance of vector space as the mathematical foundation of contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). We approach these matters only needing familiarity with math at the level of high-school algebra and calculus.

Texts: A manual will be provided.

Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

Eric Salem and Marsaura Shukla
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

The Portrait of a Lady is considered by many to be Henry James’s masterpiece. The novel follows Isabel Archer, a spirited young American, as she leaves her home in Albany, New York, and accompanies her rich aunt to England and Italy. Part Bildungsroman, part romance novel, and more than either, Isabel Archer’s story takes on larger proportions than it might seem to warrant.  James described the heroine of this exquisitely tragic novel as “affronting her destiny.” Thinking about what that might mean leads us to consider the complexities of romantic attachment and the strange nature of the modern— and maybe peculiarly American— freedom we all think we want.

Text: Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0141441269

Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree

David Carl and David Townsend
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Suttree, is a stunning portrayal of human dignity, friendship, and loyalty in the midst of poverty, violence, and despair. The novel charts the physical and spiritual adventures of Cornelius Suttree, who turns his back on his privileged Southern family to live among one of the most brilliantly conceived cast of misfits and outcasts to ever populate a novel—drunks, brawlers, squatters, and fellow searchers. Vitalized by some of the most beautiful prose ever written in the English language, McCarthy’s novel lovingly, violently, and comically portrays a wild array of characters and the outrageous situations they find themselves in. Living near Knoxville on a houseboat on the Tennessee River, Suttree seeks out meaning and redemption among the down-and-out. A book as funny as it is beautiful, and as stark as it is ultimately uplifting, this is a novel about the possibility of the human spirit to rise above even the most desperate situations, and to discover love, beauty, friendship, and humor amidst violence and depravity.

Text: Cormac McCarthy, Suttree. Vintage, ISBN 978-0679736325

Edward P. Jones’s The Known World

David Carl and Ron Martin Wilson
6–8 p.m. EDT / 4–6 p.m. MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

Composed over a decade “in [his] head” before he wrote it down, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was later voted in a New York Times Book Review poll  “the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century.”  Jones’s only novel explores a peculiar subject: a black southern slave-owner. The Known World is set ten years before the Civil War in Manchester County, Virginia, a landscape as real and yet as wholly imagined as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Its story, the subject of this seminar, exquisitely records the aftermath of the death of Henry Townsend, who “wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known.”

Text: Edward P. Jones, The Known World. Amistad (HarperCollins), ISBN 978-0061159176

Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor

Steve Isenberg and Mike Peters
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

As we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, it is timely that we read the best novel to emerge from that war, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor. Waugh, a captain in the Royal Marines, imaginatively transforms his personal experience, coupling it with an acute sense of character and foible, farce and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, faith and despair. He created a full picture of British life at home, in the officer’s mess, in battle, from false starts in the Phony War to harrowing days in Greece and Yugoslavia. Comic wit, serious purpose, and heart join to summon a world long gone, yet living anew in this vivacious drama. Americans can discover here aspects of World War II uniquely beyond our literature.

Text: Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honor. Back Bay Books, ISBN 978-0316216692

Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah

Michael Dink and Rebecca Goldner
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

In Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust weaves together worlds and people from the previous volumes of In Search of Lost Time. We spend more time among the Guermantes, return to Balbec, and revisit the Verdurin clan. Love and eros are further explored as we learn, or attempt to learn, more about the Baron de Charlus and Albertine, among others, and find grief inextricably bound to life as the family processes the loss of the grandmother. In this volume, our narrator revisits the past in new ways—both his own and Swann’s—as we explore the nature of love in a variety of iterations.

This seminar is an ongoing, multi-summer reading and discussion of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. New members are always welcome but are expected to have read the first three volumes.

Text: Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (ed. and tr. John Sturrock). Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0143039310

Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

Halley Barnet and Emma Styles-Swaim
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

In Book VIII of The Republic, Socrates considers, “then how will change take place in our state? … Shall we invoke the Muses, like Homer, and ask them to tell us ‘how the quarrel first began?’” In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens performs a similar invocation, turning to fiction to explore how social and political change come about. Set in London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution, the novel circles the nested spheres of the nation—the city, the mob, the household, the couple, and the individual. Spanning two cities, it also charts the distances between monarch and peasant, between human hearts, and between one historical moment and another. What kind of truth does a novel impart that a historical account cannot?

Text: Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0141439600

Melville’s Moby-Dick

Grant Franks and Martha Franks
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Moby-Dick is a novel of obsession and of the world. It is funny, wrenching, lovely, magnificent, and philosophical. The whaling boat, Pequod, sets off from Nantucket with a crew of varied personalities and purposes who are focused on and fascinated by Captain Ahab’s fierce pursuit of the white whale, Moby Dick. Before the quest culminates, we read of the science and law of whaling, the Platonic perspective of the crow’s nest above the ship, and the loving experience of squeezing oil together. The images offered, as well as the passions of the book’s characters, become ways of perceiving—or at least feeling—the ocean depths beneath our awareness.

Text: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0142437247

Mozart's Marriage of Figaro

Michael Golluber and Ned Walpin
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

Mozart's brilliant opera buffa (with its equally brilliant libretto by Da Ponte) presents a day of madness unlike any other. Stunning and exquisite music reveals to us more about the opera’s buffoonish characters than these characters can understand about themselves. But what is revealed to us about our own characters as we laugh at crossdressers, skirt-chasers, philanderers, and assorted scoundrels? Le Nozze di Figaro begins with Count Almaviva demanding his feudal right to bed his servant, Susanna, on her wedding night before her husband, Figaro, can sleep with her. As things progress, Figaro comes dangerously close to having to bed his own mother. At the end, the Count declares his love to Susanna, who is really his own wife disguised as his servant. Who wants to be caught in the middle? What a feast!

Text: Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro: Vocal Score (tr. Ruth Martin). Schirmer, ISBN 978-0793512089

Poems by Virgil and Seamus Heaney

Michael Dink and Stella Zhu
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

The past is complicated, both a site of trauma and a source of nourishment. In Virgil’s masterpiece The Aeneid, the Trojan prince Aeneas escapes the devastation of his country and sets sail to find a new home. He leaves Troy, carrying on his shoulders his aging father, who holds in his arms statues of native gods. This image encapsulates a central question of the epic: How do we create a future while carrying on the past, to be nourished by it rather than weighed down?

Virgil is our guide in exploring the question, as he was for Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney, whose fascination with The Aeneid gave birth to a translation of Book VI and an inspired “imitation” set in the contemporary war-stricken Northern Ireland.  We also read Heaney, both his translation and his own poetry, and think about how he inherits tradition and transforms it, wondering about the power of poetry and its relation to the past.

Texts: 

• Vergil and Virgil, The Aeneid (tr. Shadi Bartsch). Modern Library, Penguin Random House, ISBN 978-1984854124 

• Seamus Heaney, Human Chain. Faber and Faber Ltd., ISBN 978-0571275557

• Additional reading provided in a manual.

Film, Trauma, and Memory

David Carl and Katie Kretler
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

Movies are a kind of time machine. Through their capacity to unite sound and image into powerful forms of storytelling, they carry us back to the past and into the future. The movies under discussion focus on how memory shapes our present and determines our future. Study films that move back and forth between past and future, including one of the most formally innovative time travel movies ever made, a landmark of the French New Wave, and a classic work of Japanese cinema ending with Sans Soleil, a profound meditation on memory, storytelling, and identity. These films, among the greatest ever made, challenge genres and conventional modes of storytelling, and they reflect on the role that memory plays in helping us navigate the traumas of our past and the hopes for our future.

Films:

• Chris Marker, Sans Soleil
• Chris Marker, La Jetée
• Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon Amour
• Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon

Double Lives in the Films of Hitchcock

Nicholas Bellinson and Aparna Ravilochan
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

Nearly all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films reveal a preoccupation with the question of identity. His works turn the issue around and around, asking: Is identity a stable thing, definable, decipherable to oneself? To anyone else? This seminar studies four Hitchcock thrillers that meditate masterfully on the subject: Shadow of A Doubt, Notorious, North by Northwest, and Vertigo. In these films, the Master of Suspense serves up a slate of Hollywood darlings, including Joseph Cotten, Cary Grant, and Ingrid Bergman, as characters refracted into alter egos, namesakes, and mistaken or secret identities. The dizzying results challenge us to question what—and whom—we really know.

Films:

• Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt
• Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious
• Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest
• Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo

The Surrealist Film of Luis Buñuel

David Carl and Obed Lira
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

One of the most influential creators in the history of film, Luis Buñuel's prolific career spans decades, from the age of silent film in the 1920s to commercially successful films in the 1970s. We explore four films that capture the essence of some of Buñuel’s distinct phases and obsessions: the iconoclastic, surrealist masterpiece Un chien andalou (1929), which he made with Salvador Dalí; the religious satire Simon of the Desert (1965); the mordant drama Viridiana (1961); and the savage and unforgiving The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1971). Although thematically very different, all of these films remain quintessential Buñuel, whose work, in the words of Octavio Paz, constitutes “a marriage of the film image to the poetic image creating a new reality, scandalous and subversive.”

Films:

• Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou
• Luis Buñuel, Simon of the Desert
• Luis Buñuel, Viridiana
• Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War

Grant Franks and Eric Salem
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

Thucydides calls the war between Athens and Sparta “the greatest commotion” (Hobbes’ translation), even greater than the war a half-century earlier against the immense Persian army. The conflict was massive in scale, stretching from Sicily to Asia Minor. More importantly, it wracked the Greek world to its core as its two greatest cities, determined to destroy one another, were willing to wreak havoc on all Greece if need be. On both sides the foundations of political life were exposed. What can war, that “stern teacher,” teach us about ourselves and our aspirations to political community? Does Thucydides make good on his claim that his book will be a “possession for all time”?

Text: Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides (tr. Richard Crawley). Free Press, ISBN 978-0684827902

Emerson’s Essays

J. Walter Sterling and David Townsend
10 a.m.­–Noon MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays are fundamental texts for understanding the truth and power of the American Experiment. His creative, profound, and grounded vision of both individual and community is scientific, tough-minded, and uplifting. He challenges our courage and our spirit. A deep original thinker with a beautiful poetic style, Emerson elevates, enlivens, and gives us a way of hope and love for the present and future.  

We begin with Nature, (1836), his first slim yet transformative book, mapping how we may live best in household Earth. “Our age is retrospective... Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe, a poetry and philosophy of insight... a religion of revelation to us?” On the foundation of Nature, we think through his Divinity School Address that got him banned at Harvard, his “American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience.” Let us consider together how to be a truly American Scholar.

Text: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures. Library of America, ISBN 978-0940450158

Democracy in (and out of) America

Brendan Boyle and Jordi Wiersma
2–4 p.m. MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Tocqueville’s work has the local aim of illuminating the origins, commitments, contradictions, and future of the American democratic republic. And in so doing it brings remarkable clarity to the place and significance of the township system, religion, landscape, race, and local associations to American political life in the first third of the 19th century. But the work has more global aims, too, which gradually emerge out of Tocqueville’s discussion of the American case. It stands as a model for how to think and write about political systems generally and helps all students see “the political” in its full complexity.

Text: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (tr. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop). University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226805368

Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding

James Carey and Khafiz Kerimov
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

Leibniz wrote his New Essays on Human Understanding partially as a response to Locke, but his book does not presuppose any familiarity with Locke. It consists of a dialogue between two characters, Philalethes and Theophilus, who represent empiricism and rationalism, respectively. For example, Philatheles argues that all ideas originate in the senses, and Theophilus responds that the idea the mind has of itself cannot originate in the senses as does the idea of a tree, a star, color, or sound. In the New Essays, Leibniz considers a wide range of topics, among them the nature of the human mind, the distinction between necessary and contingent truths, the possibility of free choice, and the existence of God. In the course of exploring these topics, Leibniz develops his distinctive notions of simple substances (or monads) and of a pre-established harmony between soul and body.

Text: G.W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding (ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett). Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521576604

Alternate edition: G.W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding (ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett). Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521298360

Wittgenstein: On Certainty

Topi Heikkerö and Caleb Thompson
Noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.­–Noon MDT
June 30–July 4, 2025
ONLINE

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, held the striking view that “Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.”  At the end of his life, Wittgenstein took aim at Cartesian skepticism, that is, doubt about the existence of the external world. In a series of aphoristic remarks—always thought-provoking; sometimes humorous—Wittgenstein seeks to show how language leads the skeptic astray: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.” These writings were published in a short volume called On Certainty. Its thematic unity makes it unique in Wittgenstein’s oeuvre, and a good introduction to his thought.

Text: Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (ed. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright; tr. Denis Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe). Harper & Row, ISBN 978-0061316869

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals

James Carey and Frank Pagano
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

The Genealogy of Morals is Nietzsche’s primary work on morality. In it, he develops his controversial distinction between master and slave moralities, and he analyzes the spirit of resentment that animates the latter. The first essay considers the related but divergent oppositions between “good and evil” and “good and bad.” The second essay examines guilt and bad conscience. The third essay speculates on how asceticism came to be a moral ideal. The book is a sustained polemic against Western morality, its very title challenging the claim of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Kant that the fundamental principles of morality are timeless. Nietzsche’s exposure of the genealogy of morality reads like a prophecy of contemporary moral confusion and disorder.

Text: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (tr. Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale). Vintage, ISBN 978-0679724629

Justice, Rhetoric, and Power: Plato’s Gorgias

John Cornell and Janet Dougherty
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 7–11, 2025
IN-PERSON

The Gorgias is among the most accessible introductions to Plato’s work. In this dialogue, Socrates meets the orator Gorgias and his disciples, including the ambitious Callicles, who says what others are too ashamed to say. The disciples praise rhetoric as the greatest of arts. For Socrates, rhetoric is not an art at all but merely a form of flattery. He practices “the true political art”—an art that aims at justice in the soul rather than power—and is determined to defend it not just against these adversaries but against the authorities in the city. The dialogue thus reflects on the trial and death of Socrates as it explores the moral foundations of politics, law, and the best human life.

Text: Plato, Gorgias and Rhetoric (tr. Joe Sachs). Focus Philosophical Library, ISBN 978-1585102990

Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays

Seth Appelbaum and Claudia Hauer
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” remains relevant due to Heidegger’s broad reflections on the implications of the techno-scape on human relationships and culture. As we face the now-entrenched AI age, with its implicit dominance over so many aspects of human life, Heidegger’s reflections help us locate aspects of human consciousness and human being that our society, and we as individuals, have and will surrender to technology. Heidegger subjects the shift toward technocracy to a deep philosophical inquiry that leaves us better able to understand the perspectival shifts that technology has brought about in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Text: Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Harper Perennial, ISBN 978-0062290700

Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed and the Book of Job

Phil LeCuyer and Obed Lira
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 14–18, 2025
IN-PERSON

Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is an exploration of the relationship between natural science and religion. Some of the major issues he confronts are a created world vs. an eternal world; the nature of prophecy; and the array of possible opinions about providence, i.e., about the ways our world could be informed by a divine reality. In Part III of the Guide, Maimonides turns to the Book of Job as the proof text of his theoretical understandings about providence and about the distinction between good and evil. We read Job and study the concluding parable Maimonides created for evaluating different kinds of human life.

Texts: 

• Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume 1 (tr. Shlomo Pines). University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226502304

• Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume 2 (tr. Shlomo Pines). University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226502311

• Alternate option: Moses Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed a New Translation (tr. Len E. Goodman and Phillip Lieberman). Stanford University Press, ISBN 978-0804787383

• The Book of Job (tr. Robert Sacks). Green Lion Press, ISBN 978-1888009507

  Alternatively, all versions of the Old Testament identifiable by verse are acceptable.

• One additional handout provided.

Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments

Joe Macfarland and Gerard Versluis
10 a.m.–Noon MDT
July 21–25, 2025
IN-PERSON

Philosophical Fragments is a modern classic on the relation of philosophical inquiry to faith. Without jargon or gratuitous scholarship, and with the irony of a Socratic philosopher and the imagination of poet, Kierkegaard questions the nature of time—can a moment have decisive significance?—and draws out the consequences of this question for learning and teaching, and for understanding the human and the divine. How does reason encounter the ultimate paradox and the need for a teacher? As the starting point is Socratic questioning—the notion that all learning is recollection—we will begin with Plato’s Meno. Kierkegaard’s exploration of necessity and possibility, of essence and existence, is often considered to have initiated existentialism. 

Texts:

• Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus (tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong). Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691020365
• Plato, Meno (tr. Brann, Kalkavage, and Salem). Hackett (Focus Philosophical Library), ISBN 978-1585109937