Session | Session Focus | Reading Assignment | Other Assignment | Meeting Place/Exam Dates |
16 January | Introduction: the Pre-Socratics and the birth of philosophy | Pre-Socratic fragments | | |
18 January | Being and Reality: Plato’s the Allegory of the Cave; Knowledge versus Opinion | H.G. Wells, In the country of the blind; Plato, Republic | | |
23 January | Aristotle on logic and knowledge | Aristotle, Metaphysics; Categories | | |
25 January | Aquinas and Pico della Mirandola on human knowledge | Aquinas, Summa Theologica; Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man | | |
30 January | Film: The Truman Show | | | |
3 February (make up) | Giordano Bruno on God and Nature
| G. Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper; The Heroic Frenzies | | |
6 February | Science versus Religion: The trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei | Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Galileo, Letter to Madama Cristina | | |
8 February | Descartes on God and Science | R. Descartes, Discourse on the Method; Meditations | | |
13 February | Change and crisis in science: class-presentation on ancient and modern science | | | |
15 February | Plato and Aristotle on politics | Plato, Crito; The Seventh Letter; Aristotle, Politics | | |
20 February | The separation between ethics and politics: Niccolò Machiavelli | Machiavelli, The Prince; The Discourses | | |
22 February | Sovereignty and security: Thomas Hobbes / Society and the individual: Jean Jacques Rousseau | T. Hobbes, Leviathan; Rousseau, The Social Contract | | |
27 February | From individual desire to rational self-determination: Georg Hegel | G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right | | |
29 February | Review and class discussion | | | |
5 March | MIDTERM EXAMINATION | | | |
7 March | Marx on political revolutions | K. Marx, The German Ideology; Manifesto of the Communist Party | | |
9 March (make up) | Film: Land and freedom | | | |
12 March | Class-presentation: Ancient and modern political theories: a comparison | | | |
14 March | Gorgias on language | Gorgia, Encomium of Helen | | |
26 March | Locke on sensations and language | J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding | | |
28 March | The linguistic turn in contemporary philosophies | Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations | | |
2 April | Class-presentation: The power of language | | | |
4 April | Ethical virtue | Aristotle, Nicomachean Ehics | | |
11 April | Kant’s ethics | I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral | | |
16 April | Happiness as the foundation of morality | J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism | | |
18 April | Against conventional morality | F. Nietzsche, Beyond the Good and the Devil | | |
23 April | Review | | | |
| FINAL EXAMINATION | | | |