Introduction to Philosophy (USF)

In this class we will read and discuss a range of ancient philosophical, literary, and religious texts in pursuit of the answer to a fundamental question: What is the shape of a life well-lived? This question can be split into three interrelated levels. 

First, what are the individual skills or virtues that we need to respond to the challenges of life?  What exactly are courage, fairness, honor, loyalty, love of truth, humility, tolerance, gratitude, moderation, love, sympathy, faith, impartiality, apathy, commitment, confidence, confessional self-examination, trust, skepticism, generosity, etc. Why should we care about these traits?  How should we cultivate them?  How do these different virtues fit together and balance one another? For instance, canI be both humble and self-confident?  Is there a tension between resolute practical commitment and the disinterested love of truth?   

We will see that virtues can never be captured in simple rules or principles. Virtues are habitual skills that we learn from the examples provided by stories and role models that shape us. Virtues cannot be captured by rules because their proper exercise depends heavily upon situational context. For instance, it is important to be able to trust people, both those around us and those in authority over us. However, we should not be gullible or blindly obedient. So we should trust, but we should also raise skeptical questions. But how do we know when to trust and when to doubt. There is no simple rule. We only learn this by example, by practice, and by honest attention to our failures.

Second, how do social roles and cultural contexts shape the inter-relations, meanings, justifications, and divergent lists of the virtues?  How do the virtues function differently in the warrior culture of Homeric Greece, in the court of Nero, and in the governmental structures of Confucian China?  How does the emergence of states, empires, and markets shape and shift the significance of different virtues? How, why, and when does the role of the philosopher and the prophet emerge as a new ways of relating to other existing social roles? How does the Jewish experience of slavery, national vulnerability, and repeated imperial subjugation create new social roles and elevate new virtues?

Third, how does our conception of ultimate reality shape the way we inhabit, criticize, escape from social roles? We will consider the question of ultimate reality insofar as it involves the relationship between chaos and harmony. Here there are two basic positions, both of which come in many variations. According to one line of thinking, chaos is the fundamental reality of the universe. Harmony only emerges through the struggle that creates fragile and often short-lived pockets of harmony. We will examine this view as presented in the Neo-Babylonian and Greek creation myths, and we will consider how it informs the visions of war, love, and work that flourish in Homeric culture, the classical Greek city state, and the Roman Empire. 

We find the opposite view of fundamental reality in the Jewish creation story, the philosophies of Plato and the Stoics, the teaching of Jesus, Confucius, and the Bhagavad Gita. In various ways, these thinkers insist that harmony is the basic reality. They present chaos or conflict as an always only partial distortion of cosmic harmony. We will consider how this radically shifts the virtues they prioritize.

In our reading and discussion of these ancient texts, I will regularly encourage you to reflect upon the virtues, social roles, and cosmic visions that have guided your life thus far. Where the ancient texts provide us the general vocabulary we need to expresses these lived but often unnoticed features or our lives, we will draw heavily upon them. Where their attitudes offend or shock our contemporary sensibilities, we will allow the contrast to illumine the social structures and deeper assumptions that inform our values. Finally, where these texts inspire us and open new visions of life, we will follow them where they lead us.

Required Texts

Plato’s Republic (Hackett Classics)                                                 

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Penguin Classics)           

Lucretius TheNature of Things (PenguinClassics)           

Seneca’s Letters from aStoic (PenguinClassics)              

Confucius, TheAnalects (PenguinClassics)                       

PDFs on Canvas