POT4013 Great Political Thinkers I: Ancient and Medieval
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Course Description:
For Pierre Hadot, the philosophies of antiquity, despite their many differences, all "agreed with Socrates that human beings are plunged in misery, anguish, and evil because they exist in ignorance. Evil is to be found not within things, but in the value judgments which people bring to bear upon things. People can therefore be cured of their ills only if they are persuaded to change their value judgments, and in this sense all these philosophies wanted to be therapeutic." This means, among other things, that philosophy was about identifying not just what to think, but how to live. In this vein, our objective for this course will be to read the major schools of ancient philosophy as competing therapeutic attempts to identify and alleviate the ills and evils of human life. Since it was believed that the human condition must be in harmony before the city or state could exist in peace and happiness, we thus have the additional task of understanding how these therapeutic attempts at philosophy relate to the proper arrangement of citizens in political life.
The course will focus on four schools of Ancient Greek philosophical thought (as represented in the works of Greek, Roman, and medieval thinkers), reading each one to understand how its followers understood the problems associated with (individual and collective) life and how they used philosophy to overcome those problems. Thus, for each school, our investigations will necessitate (but not be limited to) asking: Who were its major contributors? What are the causes of misery that plague the human condition? What remedies does this school offer? If value judgments are the source of human misery, how are we to change these judgments? How can we achieve freedom from the domination of these judgments? What role do ethics and politics play? Speaking more generally, what would this philosophy have us do?
Course Description:
For Pierre Hadot, the philosophies of antiquity, despite their many differences, all "agreed with Socrates that human beings are plunged in misery, anguish, and evil because they exist in ignorance. Evil is to be found not within things, but in the value judgments which people bring to bear upon things. People can therefore be cured of their ills only if they are persuaded to change their value judgments, and in this sense all these philosophies wanted to be therapeutic." This means, among other things, that philosophy was about identifying not just what to think, but how to live. In this vein, our objective for this course will be to read the major schools of ancient philosophy as competing therapeutic attempts to identify and alleviate the ills and evils of human life. Since it was believed that the human condition must be in harmony before the city or state could exist in peace and happiness, we thus have the additional task of understanding how these therapeutic attempts at philosophy relate to the proper arrangement of citizens in political life.
The course will focus on four schools of Ancient Greek philosophical thought (as represented in the works of Greek, Roman, and medieval thinkers), reading each one to understand how its followers understood the problems associated with (individual and collective) life and how they used philosophy to overcome those problems. Thus, for each school, our investigations will necessitate (but not be limited to) asking: Who were its major contributors? What are the causes of misery that plague the human condition? What remedies does this school offer? If value judgments are the source of human misery, how are we to change these judgments? How can we achieve freedom from the domination of these judgments? What role do ethics and politics play? Speaking more generally, what would this philosophy have us do?
image credit: Diogenes by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1860)