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Courses

Spring 2024

Ancient Virtue Ethics (553)

We will focus on the way “virtue” (aretê) and the specific virtues became the focal point for Greek reflection on ethics. First seen expressly in elegiac poetry and in epitaphic inscription of the late sixth and early fifth centuries, classical-era writers begin trying out various “proto-canons” of virtue as the ingredients in a successful and praiseworthy life. With this comes new analysis of the relationship between these virtues. This analysis becomes most vigorous, and wholly problematized, in the dialogues of Plato; Aristotle makes some compromises in developing the fullest account.

Fall 2022

Ancient Philosophy (200)

This semester we aim to understand what forms ethical advice and reasoning take in classical Greek philosophy and para-philosophical literary production, especially the relationship such thought has with putative non-ethical issues: the study of nature, critique of religion, reflection on fundamental reality, and the technique of rhetoric. So we read selections from the maxim collections of Hesiod, Isocrates, and Stobaeus; Euripides Bacchae and various sophistic texts; the Platonic Apology, Charmides, Laches, and Symposium; Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics and Physics; and collections of sayings of Diogenes the Cynic and Epictetus the Stoic.

Plato (461)

We aim to understand the project of classical Greek political theory and philosophy to which Plato’s Republic contributes a central piece. In the semester’s first third, we study extant interpretations and critique of democracy, esp. in Aristophanes, Thucydides, and ps.-Xenophon, as well as that depicted in various Platonic dialogues. Then we read Charmides and Republic as companion analyses of epistemocracy and the virtue of “doing one’s own things” (among much else). We conclude with several weeks on “the drama of political conflict”: Critias’ Atlantis tale and the ps.-Platonic letters.

Spring 2022

How to Live (015H)

Philosophy, uniquely, studies how best to live. It does so by articulating as-yet unasked questions and hypothesizing as-yet inchoate solutions. These concern the nature of the good life, and the direct or indirect routes to it, if there are any. Ought one to minimize mental suffering by eliminating superstition and fear? Or to control one’s bodily desires through feats of endurance and redirection of focus? Or to accept modesty about what one really knows, examining the rational basis of one’s beliefs? Or to reduce the amount of harm and injustice one does, tracing out the consequences of one’s every action? Or to change the way people think, including oneself, by revealing the power dynamics beneath everyday social institutions? Every two weeks this course articulates a distinct hypothesis from around the world, both historical and contemporary; discusses powerfully memorable literature on the matter; identifies the pertinent reasons; and then – most distinctively – puts some aspect of it into personal practice for one or more days. This is a matter of living philosophy. You will track, process, and evaluate your experiences through inventorying, journaling, and other modes of writing. For your final project, a written dialogue, you will address the signal difficulties in advocating any life that is radically new. With suitable commitment to the discussions, readings, and assignments, you should leave the class recognizing the diversity and challenge of a range of way-of-life ideals, their historical context and contemporary promise, how to decide on their appropriateness for yourself, and what it would mean to adopt, refine, and support your own “philosophy” of life.

Books assigned: Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations; Xenophon, Memorabilia; Plato, Charmides and Laches; Dalai Lama, An Introduction to Buddhism; Confucius, Analects; Thoreau, Walden; Dave Eggers, The Every.

Practical exercises: food consumption journal; apartment inventory; only questions; mindfulness; indifference; analect memorization; wandering; screen-free time.

 

Fall 2021

Ancient Ethics (553)

In the ancient Greek context, “ethics” deals with the way a person’s character might be agathos (“good”) or exemplify aretê (“excellence”). Because people live with and among other people, human goodness is in some part judged socially: personal excellence in a civic context may involve appearing impressive or generous or respectful toward others. But ethical action need be neither other-oriented nor beneficial, at least not ostensibly or directly; it is judged principally as conducive to one’s flourishing, glory, or ongoing esteem, and this may include self-directed efforts. Accordingly, much of the specification and debate found in ethical reflection will concern the following:

• what is human goodness or excellence? what determines it?
• what character traits, mental capacities, resources, and relationships conduce to it?
• what apparent or actually desirable things are incompatible with it?
• what degree of concern for other people’s well-being is entailed by it?

The purpose of this course is to study the way these and related questions arose, the kinds of answers they first received, and how different solutions came to be assessed.

The texts we study in the first three weeks of the semester are poetic. We look first at epitaphs: metrical reflections on a person’s life and death. These reveal patterns of summary praise and characterization. We turn then to Hesiod’s and Theognis’ works of advice: how to live well. In diagnosing common failings and making specific recommendations, they give sharp outline to core ethical concepts, identify salient difficulties, and imply rankings of value. Euripides (week 3) has dramatized a kind of meta-ethical conflict: obstacles to living well founded on mistaken insights into prime ethical concepts themselves. So he depicts a time when ethical reflection plays a feedback role in the ethical life itself. Over the subsequent two weeks, we deal with a variety of pre-Platonic philosophical texts, many of them fragmentary, from the turn of the 5^th to the 4^th century. Some deal with ethics obliquely – that is, not theoretically, not as a contribution to ethical reflection as such – but all do so subtly. Here is how philosophy could have gone. The next ten weeks address core texts from 4^th-c ethical reflection and philosophy. We start with Xenophon’s vindication of Socrates’ life as one that is ethically excellent. We then turn to five dialogues of Plato’s, each of which features Socrates and each of which emphasizes certain of our above questions, though with the Republic synthesizing them in its distinctive way. We dedicate the last month to the most systematic classical reflection on ethics, and among the most influential works on ethics of all time, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Against the background of the previous months of reading and discussion, besides interpreting and evaluating his specific arguments, we will try to understand why his work takes the shape it does.

 

Spring 2020

Plato (461)

This course provides an occasion to read and discuss many of the dialogues of Plato of Athens, an historically influential and still frequently discussed author and school founder, the Greek language’s greatest prose writer, and the most provocative authority for the meaning of Socrates’ life and thought. All his dialogues (but one) present intellectual conversations between (mainly) historical persons living one or two generations earlier, during the Attic Enlightenment/Sophistic Movement. The interlocutors are especially exercised by the possibility that talking in particular ways about virtue and related concepts may conduce to personal and civic flourishing. Usually with Socrates’ guidance, they come to reflect on the best structures of conversation, the nature and source of human flourishing, and the psychology/cognition, society/politics, and cosmology/ontology necessary if talking is in fact going to make one’s life go better.

Though we may discuss Plato’s precursors and the two dozen centuries of his reception, we will focus our attention on the works themselves, reading them in a contextualist fashion, sensitive to genre, historical background, use of language, characterization, and intentional and unintentional omissions. Awareness of these dialogues may help in understanding more recent authors for whom Plato is in explicit or implicit background; they may also offer opportunities for reflection valuable in itself; and, finally, they may even treat some readers to an appreciable pleasure.

Students may expect to read Alcibiades, Charmides, Symposium, Euthydemus, Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Apology, Phaedo, Cratylus, Lovers, Republic, Timaeus, Laws 1–2, 10.

Fall 2019

How to Live (015H)

Philosophy, uniquely, studies how best to live. It does so by articulating as-yet unasked questions and hypothesizing as-yet inchoate solutions. These concern both the nature and existence of the good life, and the direct or indirect routes to it, if there are any. Ought one to minimize mental suffering by eliminating superstition and fear? Or to control one’s bodily desires through feats of endurance and redirection of focus? Or to accept modesty about what one really knows, examining the rational basis of one’s beliefs? Or to reduce the amount of harm and injustice one does, tracing out the consequences of one’s every action? Or to change the way people think, including oneself, by revealing the power dynamics beneath everyday social institutions? Each week this course articulates a distinct hypothesis from around the world, both historical and contemporary; discusses powerfully memorable literature on the matter; identifies the pertinent reasons; and then – most distinctively – puts some aspect of it into personal practice for one or more days. This is a matter of living philosophy. You will track, process, and evaluate your experiences through journaling, blogging, and other modes of writing. For your final project, you will formulate your own views about the your philosophical “best way of life,” one that you will share with other students, the world, and your future self. With suitable commitment to the discussions, readings, and assignments, you should leave the class recognizing the diversity and challenge of a range of way-of-life ideals, their historical context and contemporary promise, how to decide on their appropriateness for yourself, and what it would mean to adopt, refine, and support your own “philosophy” of life.

Ancient Philosophy (200)

This course is chronologically the first in our department’s intermediate-level sequence in the history of philosophy (also Medieval, Modern 1600–1800, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, American 1860–2000, and Contemporary). Serving as introduction to both philosophy as a current discipline and philosophia as an ancient discipline, this course has the mission to read texts closely and discover their argumentative projects by reflecting, ourselves, on the urgency and texture of the problems and questions they seem to be confronting. The range of possible texts for an ancient philosophy class is broad, from seventh-century mythographic poems, to the fragments of pre-Socratic scientists and abstract thinkers, to the dialogues of Plato and lectures of Aristotle, to the witnesses to the philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic period – Stoicism, Skepticism, Cynicism, Peripateticism, Academic thought, and so on. This course will focus on only a portion of that material, but a representative if also coherent portion: the period of the Sophists in Athens’  late fifth and early fourth centuries. This includes the writings and thought of Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Critias, Socrates, and various anonymous authors, as well as the deep and sophisticated engagements with these thinkers by Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle, among others.

Fall 2018

Topics in Philosophy of Law: Constitutional Interpretation (405) [syllabus]

This course addresses the essential philosophical questions connected to constitutional interpretation, among the crucial issue for both law and our democratic life (other key issues, not discussed here, include penal sentencing and administrative regulations). We will focus on the US Constitution and Supreme Court, with close attention to the arguments and justifications articulated in the course of US current affairs. The basic problem is the following: if state and federal laws are valid only if they conform to the US Constitution, how is one to know what counts as conforming to the US Constitution? Three principal philosophical questions arise in this context; all are normative rather than merely descriptive, concerned with publicly-acceptable reasons in favor of doing something rather than the fact whether something is done. (i) What are the sources of the Constitution’s continued normative force – that is, how can contemporary legal validity depend on a short text from several centuries ago? (ii) What kinds of considerations may judges appeal to deciding what the UC Constitution says about any matter proposed by a problematic case – that is, to what extent may they appeal to history, linguistics, personal feelings and moral judgments, political sentiments and ideological vision, economic facts and social mores, and US legal precedent and non-US parallels? (iii) What precisely can we make of the so-called law-making vs. law-discovering dichotomy, especially in the context of the “separation of powers” and the necessarily abstract formulation of any legislated law – that is, how “creative” is “interpretation”? In answering these and other questions, the “due process” and “equal protection” clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment will provide special points of focus, given their centrality to morally and socially urgent jurisprudence.

Texts from leading philosophers of law will guide us, but not to the exclusion of the concrete reality of constitutional interpretation: we will spend much time reading and analyzing a range of provocative recent Supreme Court arguments and decisions, as well as philosophical, legal, and journalistic commentary on the Supreme Court. Thus this class, with its deep and rigorous study of foundational legal reasoning, has the particular goal of helping students think philosophically and speak thoughtfully about the most challenging legal – and thus also political and cultural – problems today.

 

Ancient Greek Seminar: Early Greek Philosophy (553) [syllabus]

We  study the fragments of the sixth- and fifth-century bce thinkers called phusiologoi/phusikoi/philosophountes by Aristotle (e.g., Pherecydes, Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus) and sophistai by Plato (e.g., Protagoras, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Gorgias, Hippias), with an eye to their methods, concerns, and other distinguishing features of their practices. Since the fourth-century bce, some of these thinkers have been grouped as “early Greek philosophers” because later philosophoi considered them their direct disciplinary forebears, others because they shared materially in the interests, practices, and conversations of such people. Our study requires attending to related Greek intellectual practices, including medicine, constitutional reform, and myth-rectification. It also requires knowing something of the intellectual practices of neighboring societies, including the astronomy, cosmogony, mathematics, and record-keeping of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, which influenced the Greeks, as well as appreciating the rise of cognate traditions in India and China. These contexts will help us to ask, of the Greek situation, about the position of ethical reflection and political critique in the holistic practice of theoria; our thinkers’ consciousness of argumentative structures and dialectical engagement; their practice of “ways of life”; their investigation into selfhood and its relation to knowledge and other normative notions; and the use of fragments of ancient Greeks by later authors. They will also help us to ask about the significance, if any, of our studying early Greek philosophy; the notion of culturally-bound disciplinary “origins”; and the meaning of the practice of the history of philosophy.

 

Fall 2017

Ancient Philosophy (200) [syllabus]

Philosophy is unique as a skill and discipline. All others have outcomes that benefit us only instrumentally, by contributing to other skills and disciplines. The outcome of philosophy, by contrast, benefits us directly, producing what the Greeks called eudaimonia (“god-favored” or “flourishing”). That, at any rate, was the belief of certain Ancient Greeks, among whom the discipline they called philosophia arose (similar disciplines, with other names, arose in other civilizations, especially India and China, but also in Persia, Egypt, and Judaea). But that belief is held by many people through history. And it is an astonishing belief, that there is a discipline – and even more, a skill – concerned with our living well. Thus the point of this class is easily stated: we will study the source, the nature, and the truth of the Greek claim that philosophy is the only skill and discipline concerned with our being as happy as humans have it in our power to be.

 

Fall 2016

Ancient Philosophy (200) [syllabus]

Our course begins with Plato’s depictions of Socrates (469–399 bce), the man who became, for many of the intellectuals and investigators of the ensuing centuries, the paradigmatic philosopher; and for the rest, an iconic and historically significant one. This means thinking through what Socrates seems to have stood for, reconstructing his reasons for so standing, and evaluating those reasons for plausibility. By doing so we of course end up going some way toward deciding whether we stand for the same thing, and if not, what justifies our going our separate ways. That is to say, if we seek our own “philosophy of life,” we may be able to do so efficiently and effectively by seeking out the strengths and weaknesses of those reputed to have the most promising, appealing, and rigorously defined “philosophies of life.” And if in our “philosophy of life” we decide that engaging in self-cultivation, striving for virtue, trying to believe what is true rather than what is false, and caring for others as they ought to be cared for are the best policies, then studying the ancient philosophers who also did so gives us good models.

Socrates hardly represents the only philosopher worth our attention from ancient Greece. Nor does his existence explain itself. So we turn to those who preceded him, hoping to learn how a person like Socrates could come to be, and how a practice like “philosophy” could become available for him to try out. Likewise, Greek philosophy was just getting started with Socrates, so we will give close attention to some of his contemporaries, followers, and admirers. Deciding who deserves this close attention raises its own questions, and so we will think about the nature of philosophy, the structure of disciplines, and the meaning of “ways of life.”

 

Ancient Greek Seminar: Socrates (553) [syllabus]

This seminar studies ancient Greek philosophy by focusing on Socrates. This focus involves formulating questions of (in alphabetic order) conversation, dialogicality, discipline (sôphrosunê) and self-control (enkrateia), elenchus, exhortation, flourishing (eudaimonia), the good, ignorance, intellectualism, irony, justice (dikaiosunê), love (erôs), normativity, persuasion (peitho), philosophy, piety, self-knowledge, skepticism, sophistry, the study of nature, the unity of virtue, writing, and other topics. Because Socrates did not write, the issue of reception and the history of philosophy becomes central. Because Socrates seems mostly to have asked questions, the challenge to reconstructing his views, positions, and meaning also becomes central.

Besides beginning to articulate and respond to questions about the topics listed above, five principles guide the unfolding of this course. (i) Socrates is among the key figures of philosophy, and so a philosophical education requires close study of the arguments, concepts, texts, and movements associated with him. (ii) Graduate students should prepare themselves to teach a college-level “Ancient Philosophy” course, and doing so requires understanding the historical context, the manner by which our perspective on the “great philosophers” has come about, the use to the history of philosophy that ancient philosophy has been put, and lively details about the characters in ancient philosophy. (iii) Many of the important philosophers of the last two centuries respond directly or indirectly to Socrates; their arguments, and their soundness, can be understood and evaluated only with detailed knowledge of the ancient material. (iv) Socrates is presented as a master of pedagogy despite his disavowal of teaching; our own classroom leading benefits from reflection on that presentation. (v) The contested meanings of “philosophy” developed in the Socratic era; understanding our present-day confusions about its meaning is helped by working through the origins of the concept.

 

Fall 2015

Introduction to Theories of Knowledge (125w) [syllabus]

In a class with a broad official scope – “Historical and contemporary views on the foundations and conditions of knowledge, belief, justification, and truth, conception, perception, and interpretation” – we gain focus by considering one aspect of epistemology: self-knowledge. This allows us to ask and pursue possible answers to the following half-dozen related questions: (i) How is knowing another person like knowing oneself? (ii) What exactly is the self that we can or would like to know? (iii) What good does having self-knowledge provide? (iv) What kind of knowledge (knowledge that, knowledge how, etc.) is self-knowledge? (v) What are the obstacles to self-knowledge (self-delusion, soul-blindness)? (vi) How ought we to relate our self-conception and self-inventory to self-knowledge?

 

Introduction to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Ethics (105) [syllabus]

This course falls into five sections: (i) Overview. The philosophically most-pressing questions of law: the social purpose of law, the reasons for obeying law, the natural versus political origins of law, and the personal and public products of law. (ii) Literature. The effects and workings of law in novels, imaginative literary evocations of concrete human situations. (iii) Nature of law. The elements of inquiry discussed above: source, discovery, articulation, force, and effect. We focus on two complementary and equally profound texts by the twentieth-century’s preeminent philosophers of law. (iv) Punishment. Punishment follows the breaking of law; but its content is usually something that, in any other context, would itself require breaking the law (e.g., taking your money, restricting your movements, killing you). What makes punishment legal and appropriate, and more specifically, which kinds of punishment, for which kinds of law-breaking, and for which reasons precisely? (v) The Supreme Court. We will study and read about a few Supreme Court cases throughout the semester. This prepares us for the end of the semester, where our final projects investigate Supreme Court cases from 2014–15.

 

Fall 2014

Ethics (418w) [syllabus]

This course examines the connections between moral theory/ethical reflection and other core questions in recent English-language philosophy, including those of virtue, authenticity, knowledge, free will, personhood, responsibility, and happiness. We will study, among others, Murdoch, Williams, Korsgaard, MacIntyre, Velleman, and Frankfurt, as well as a short story, a novella, and two novels.

 

Introduction to Ethics (103w) [syllabus]

A reading of the most interesting and incisive philosophical works in the history of ethical thinking: Plato, Aristotle, Aurelius, Butler, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche. Our goal is to understand what lived situations occasion ethical inquiry, what questions press most urgently, what modes of analysis, interpretation, and creative imagination best generate plausible hypothetical answers to these questions, and how we might personally and together evaluate these hypotheses for ourselves.

 

 

Spring 2013: Athens [program]

Birth of Greek Philosophy [syllabus] [blog]

We begin by studying the ritual, mythic, and intellectual content and justification for Greek religion, and the parallel wisdom tradition eventuating in the Seven Sages. We study three images of the early philosopher: Pythagoras, Thales, and Heraclitus. We follow the development of an increasingly coherent and reflective study of the world, in the so-called Presocratics. In the second half of the course, we study the arguments about philosophy’s value in Plato’s works: Apology, Charmides, Euthydemus, and Phaedo.

Our overall goal is to investigate the reasons certain ways of carrying on a conversation, disciplining oneself, seeking matters of highest value, and investigating the world and human society came to seem distinct from other important intellectual, investigative, and spiritual practices. In particular, we will distinguish philosophia from disciplines we might now call religious expertise, political leadership, natural history, linguistics, and self-improvement. We will be sensitive to the contributions the urban environment, the natural environment, and the international environment—all to which our semester-long situation in Attica will expose us—provide to this development and differentiation.

 

Aristophanes [syllabus]

We read all eleven of Aristophanes’ (446-386 BCE) extant comedies, written and produced between 425 and 388 BCE for the Athenian dramatic festivals. We study them as elements of civic, religious, and democratic life; carefully wrought literary productions; vehicles for insight into gender, class, and national relations; and reflections of intellectual trends in post-Periclean Athens. Of course we address them first as funny, and so we always work to understand the ways their structure, characters, and vocabulary could be funny both to their contemporary audience and to us. This allows us to understand the way the plays’ humor contributes to their other functions—dramatic, political, and social. Our experience of Athens in 2014 will lead us to ask questions about Aristophanes’ critique of Athens in the late 5th and early 4th centuries BC.

 

 

Fall 2013

Philosophy of Education (115) [syllabus] [blog]

Philosophy of education articulates and evaluates the concepts, arguments, and values that people could use to justify school arrangements, beliefs about the sources and guides for human development, the appropriate treatment of children, attitudes toward teachers, and other elements of a culture’s educational situation. It in particular seeks to understand the meaning of the idea “education” itself—its ideals, its tolerance for non-ideal instances, the roles proper to it, and the people proper to those roles. At higher levels of detail, it distinguishes education from other modes of influence (e.g., punishment, conditioning, “nature”), coordinates education with other social structures (e.g., economic work, family participation, religious observation), and orients thinking about education among other disciplines (anthropology, child psychology, political theory).

 

Greek Intellectual Prose (CAMS 425) [syllabus]

We study a range of Greek historians, and practitioners of the intellectual disciplines developing alongside history, in the Greece of 500-350 BCE. These adjacent fields include philosophy, linguistics and rhetoric, and literary studies. Through the course, students improve their ability to read classical Greek prose; learn about the important practitioners of socio-historical research, political reflection, and pedagogical innovation from our period; develop argumentative, analytic, and interpretative skills; and grow accustomed to critical and rigorous investigation into and deliberation about classical Greek culture. Students from this course have reconstructed Wikipedia entries for Xenophon, Xenophon’s Symposium, the Platonic Clitophon, Dissoi Logoi, and the Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine.

 

 

Moral/Political Philosophy

Introductory and Advanced Ethics (Fall 2014, described above)

Philosophy of Education (Fall 2013, described above)

Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy [syllabus]

Introduction to Political Philosophy

Law and Morality

Introduction to Philosophy [syllabus]

 

Aesthetics

Drama and Philosophy [syllabus 1] [syllabus 2] [blog] [blog 2]

Aesthetics

Aristophanes (Spring 2014, described above)

 

Ancient Philosophy

Ancient Philosophy [syllabus 1] [syllabus 2]

Greek Poetry & Philosophy

Roman Poetry & Philosophy [syllabus]

Plato [syllabus] [blog]

Socrates [syllabus]

 

Greek Language and Literature

Greek Intellectual Prose (Fall 2013, described above)

Attic Greek (two semester sequence offered twice) [Hansen & Quinn] [syllabus for Grk 101] [syllabus for Grk 102]

Directed readings in Greek philosophical prose (e.g., De Anima | Alcibiades | Socratica)