PHIL 456APhilosophy and History

Catalog

What does it mean to think politically? This course approaches that question by dissolving a distinction we tend to take for granted: the one between philosophy and history. Reading ancient Greek historians - Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon - alongside ancient Greek philosophers - Plato and Aristotle - we discover that historians were advancing philosophical arguments about human nature, power, and justice, while philosophers were making claims about history and contesting how political life should be narrated and understood. For example, we will read: Plato's Republic as a text composed in the shadow of the Peloponnesian War and, in part, as response to Thucydides; Plato's Gorgias is set in conversation with Thucydides' Melian Dialogue; Aristotle's Politics as a political theory, which takes previous Greek history into consideration; and Aristotle's Poetics as questioning the particularity of history vs. the universality of "fiction." Across these pairings, a set of urgent questions emerges: What is justice, and can it survive the realities of power? What do historical events reveal about human nature that philosophical argument alone cannot? And what is lost - or gained - when we tell the story of political life as philosophy rather than as history, or as history rather than as philosophy? No prior background in ancient philosophy or history is required. A willingness to read carefully and argue seriously is.