The First Philosophers

Catalog description

What is being? What is time? What is justice? What is truth? What is the best way to live, and should we fear death? More than 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece, a tradition of asking this sort of question developed under the name “philosophy,” which is Greek for “love of wisdom.” Veering away from the mythological and religious traditions dominant at the time, the first writers we now recognize as “philosophers” broke radically new ground for self-understanding and set the stage for modern scientific, political, and theological ideas. In this course, we will read the earliest surviving texts of this tradition by a group of authors who are now known collectively as the “Pre-Socratics.” These include Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Ancient Atomists, to name a few. These texts are fragmentary, since the full works are lost. The ideas that we find in them are creative, inspiring, and often funny. Studying them is an opportunity to reflect on what “philosophy” means and an invitation to philosophize, perhaps becoming THE CURRICULUM 124 philosophers ourselves. This survey course on the origins of philosophy is designed both for beginners, for whom it would serve as an introduction, and for those more experienced in philosophy who wish to enrich their knowledge of its roots. We will accompany our readings of the first philosophers with commentaries by later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, and with occasional reference to non-Greek or non-philosophical sources. Rousseau and the Fractures of Authenticity