A
Seminar in Classical Philosophy: Philosophy, Poetry, and the Polis.
Philosophy 3310
Spring 2017
Dr. Anne-Marie Schultz
TR 3:35-4:45 105 Morrison
“American
culture, like Athenian democracy, is highly prone to authority and peer
pressure, and to seeing political argument as a matter of boasts and
assertions, of scoring ‘points’ for one’s side. That is why Socrates has so
much to offer us, why Socrates is so urgently needed.” Martha Nussbaum
[W]hen we lose Socrates, we lose reflection,
and when we lose reflection, we lose wisdom. And it is not only wisdom that we
lose, although that is bad enough. When we lose Socrates, when we lose
reflection, we lose a kind of closeness to reality, the ability to see the
things that exist only in nuance, in hidden corners, in the uncommon details of
life.” Stephen Carter
Please tell me a bit about
this course.
First of all, welcome to the world of
Classical Philosophy (PHI 3310). We’ll
cover a range of thinkers from Homer to Aristotle. I’m excited to reported that I’ve changed the focus of this course to
sharpen our awareness of what the Greeks can teach us about living as informed
citizens in our increasingly
complex moral and political world.
I’m excited also, but I am wondering exactly what we’ll study in
this class.
Here’s a description of what we’ll explore
together.
Over two thousand years ago, ancient thinkers like Thales,
Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and Sappho began to wonder about the
nature of the world around them. They searched for answers about the structure
of the cosmos and the meaning of human experience. In many ways, they were no
different than the average person who has such thoughts today. We live in a
world where we are bombarded with choices about how to communicate aspects of
our experience with others. These thinkers lived long before there were blogs
and Facebook feeds and Twitter streams.
Their mental landscape was uncluttered by constant texting and email and
cell phone use. However, like us, they
longed to communicate. In some cases, even before there was the written word
itself, these thinkers began to share their ideas about how the world and human
experience appeared to them. They
created the horizon of philosophical inquiry itself. As the centuries passed, Heraclitus,
Parmenides, and Pythagoras added their insights to this burgeoning
philosophical conversation. Decades later, the atomists, the sophists, and
Socrates debated the nature of the human soul and the existence of the good.
Plato furthered these conversations by writing great philosophical masterpieces
like the Symposium, the Republic, and the Apology. Aristotle carried these inquires further with his Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Metaphysics.
The conversations recorded in these various texts become the foundation of
western philosophical, social, and political thought. Of course, there are many voices that
remained outside of this conversation but none the less played important roles
in shaping what we know as the practice of philosophy. To the extent possible, we’ll try to uncover
some of these lost philosophical voices.
