The World of Greek Philosophy

This course is nearly at capacity for students applying in the Extended round. We strongly recommend you consider at least one alternative course option for your application.

This course will serve as an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy and literature of the pre-Classical, Classical, and Hellenistic Greek world, and their conceptions that at once influence and differ from our own. In addition to discussing traditional Greek understandings of virtue, honor, and happiness, we will consider how intellectual life was believed to help people find meaning, purpose, and self-fulfillment and shape their ethics. We will recreate the experience of Greek intellectual culture in simulated marketplace disputations and (non-alcholic) symposia while reading and discussing works from Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Euclid, and the Stoics, in an effort to understand not just what but how they thought.