Welcome to the World of Classical Philosophy

    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.