Great Issues in Social Science
Dr. Perusek

Honors 155H - CRN 4309 SPRING 2004
Tuesday & Thursday
12:10 – 1:30pm
Observatory

Classical Foundations of Ethics, Social Science and Politics

Through careful, close reading of essential originary texts from classical Athens (fifth-fourth centuries BC), we explore the very foundations of western thought in general, and the social and political sciences in particular. In orienting lectures, I will speak to the influence of Athens upon later thought (Roman stoicism and skepticism, Christianity, and modern thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, as well as on contemporary feminism and democratic theory). We will spend our time in close reading of key texts. Toward the end of the term, we will turn to the New Testament and Augustine, the influential Church Father, to begin to explore the relationship between Platonism and early Christianity.
Students are expected to read independently—to go through Kitto toward the early part of the term and to employ Lesky (and other valuable secondary materials) as we work through the primary texts. If you haven’t done painstakingly careful textual analysis before, you will be learning a new method, a new way of reading, in this course. If, in your judgment, you cannot approach the course with the maturity and independence of mind that it will require, you should not remain enrolled.

Primary readings [*These readings are on reserve at the library.]

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin, 1961).
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001).
*Thucydides, Jowett trans., Perikles’ funeral oration (ii, 35-46), and Melian
dialogue (v, 84-114).
Plato, Republic
Plato, Symposium, trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).
*The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, two volumes, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1892). Plato, Meno=p. 360. Plato, Phaedo=pp. 447-50.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999).
Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
Oxford Annotated Bible, with the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). [RSV]
Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).