Description

The middle centuries of the first millennium BCE were a time of radical upheaval in civilizations across Eurasia. Philosophers and sages from Greece to China challenged traditional modes of thought and worked to imagine radically new ways that individuals and society might flourish.

We, too, find ourselves in a time of upheaval—politically, environmentally, and with the shock of a global pandemic. In this course, we read some of those ancient texts with modern eyes and ask whether the answers those thinkers found might fruitfully apply to some of the questions we face today. Participants consider texts from ancient Greece, India, and China that ask probing questions about what it means to be human and how we can find peace and happiness in a turbulent world.

Course content:

• Session 1: “The unexamined life is not worth living”: Plato’s Apology
• Session 2: The characteristic activity of human beings: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
• Session3: The highest human good: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
• Session 4: Suspending judgment and finding peace: Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism
• Session 5: Quarrelling monkeys and butterfly dreams: Zhuangzi’s “On Equalizing Things”
• Session 6: Finding the true self: the Kaṭha Upaniṣad
• Session 7: Finding there’s no self: the Buddha’s Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta
• Session 8: Suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the Path: the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism
• Session 9: Cultivating human nature: the Confucian ideal of the gentleman
• Session 10: Cultivating natural humans: Zhuangzi, Diogenes the Cynic, and the repudiation of cultural convention