Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy

GOV 1060AR Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course serves as an introduction to ancient political thought. Rather than being a broad survey, this course will offer an alternative to the distracted media universe of our current age by building habits of sustained attention trained on a few key texts of ancient political thought: Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. Political philosophy began with the questions "How should I live?" "How should we live?" This course seeks to bring those questions to life in our current age, to unfold the deep and rich answers offered to these questions by ancient philosophers, to offer some comparative exposure to ancient Near Eastern, Chinese, Jewish,  Christian, and Islamic political thought, and to show the connections between ancient and contemporary debates. 1060P puts Plato at the center of the course. 1060AR puts Aristotle at the center of the course.