Issues such as virtue, the good life, the role of reason in human life, freedom of the will, the origin of evil, the existence of God, and the nature of knowledge will be explored through the use of classical texts. Within each period the readings will concentrate on problems which were especially pertinent to the particular historical period in question. The aim of the course is not to give a comprehensive survey of western philosophy. Instead, the goal is to challenge students to think deeply about philosophical problems by reading a few texts as intensively as possible. In the first couple of weeks, we work on translating arguments from English to logic and determining whether these arguments are valid.
Logic is an important tool of the course.
I have written a text for this part of the course. We read some secondary material on the Sophists, who thought every opinion is as true as any other. Socrates rejected the Sophists view and thought moral opinions could be improved by critical questioning. Last we read some early views of Plato in the Meno . Plato thought that moral matters such as what is justice could be rationally aroused in persons by questioning in a way parallel to questions in math.