Texts and Authors I'm Teaching This Fall

We're now at the end of Week 2 of the classes I'm teaching locally for Marquette University and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  Many readers, viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans have expressed curiosity about the thinkers and texts we're covering in my Foundations in Philosophy (Marquette) and Philosophies of Human Nature (MIAD) classes, so I thought I'd take a bit of time and discuss those a bit.

There is a good bit of overlap in the material covered in these two classes, and there's several reasons for that.  Every one of the texts and authors we're reading and discussing is someone I think well worth engaging with for a student just beginning in philosophy.  Some of them are thinkers I've previously developed resources on when I taught them in the past, so I have good handouts, lesson page, or videos ready at hand. And, since I'm teaching a LOT this semester, I wanted to keep from having two entirely different preps for these two classes.

So for all of you who have been inquiring about my classes - and anyone else who is interested in the matter - here's the reading lists, followed by a bit more about new resources I'm developing not only for those academic classes, but also for my other online students, as well as for the general public.

The Reading List for My Marquette Course

The Marquette class, Foundations in Philosophy, is a new course that replaces their Intro-level class, Philosophy of Human Nature in the new core.  While there was no required reading that every instructor's version of the course had to incorporate, there were some mandates that had to be met.

At least one text had to come from ancient philosophy (either Plato or Aristotle).  One had to represent the Catholic intellectual tradition.  Another had to be "non-Western".  And a fourth had to be from "contemporary philosophy" (though what that term was supposed to mean was far from clear!).   Here's the list I settled on.

• Plato, The Apology 
• Aristotle, The Politics 
• Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics 
• Cicero, On The Ends
• Lao Zi, The Dao De Jing 
• The Analects of Confucius 
• The Book of Filial Piety 
• Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 
• Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method 
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 
• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women 
• Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling 
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism 
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex 
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

For many of these, we are just reading selections from the works, rather than the entire text.  The students are quite bright, but almost entirely green when it comes to studying philosophy.  I might end up trimming it slightly over the course of the term, depending on how things go.

The Reading List for My MIAD Course

My Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design students are an entirely different set.  While the Philosophies of Human Nature class I'm teaching is for beginners, instead of being a required course, it is an upper-level humanities elective.  Rather than most of the students being incoming freshmen, the students in this course are nearly all juniors and seniors.  And most importantly, MIAD is a professional school.  Every one of my students there is either a Fine Arts or a Design major.

Because they have significantly higher demands on their time, I can't assign quite so much reading to the MIAD students.  What we're actually looking at are pared-down selections from the texts - an average of 12 pages of fairly dense reading each weekly class session.  Here are the texts we're covering:

• Plato, The Apology
• Plato, The Republic
• Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
• Cicero, On The Ends
• Augustine, The City of God
• Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Inequality Among Men
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women
• Karl Marx, Philosophical And Economic Manuscripts
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: The Play Element in Culture
• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

You'll notice there's a good bit of overlap - Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Descartes, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, and Arendt are covered in both classes.  But this one has a few other readings that I thought particularly important for Art and Design students to encounter through some formal study.

Rousseau and Marx - those are both thinkers that these students will benefit from understanding.  With the Rousseau piece, we get discussion about the corrupting influence of civilization, and with Marx, we get a focus on the human being as homo faber.  Rilke and Huizinga might seen stranger, less overtly philosophical choices.  But for Art and Design students, having an actual artist who offers philosophical concepts and advice, and a theorist who focuses on play and creativity - those lend additional depth to our examination of models of human nature.

Resources Available or Being Developed

For those who aren't enrolled in those classes - quite likely all of my readers - and who want access to the resources I develop for them, there are quite a few available.

Many of these authors are covered in an inexpensive ($75), open-access online course - Philosophical World Views and Values, available in my online Sadler Online Academy (where I offer other classes as well).  So if you're looking for a structured learning environment for studying philosophy, you should check that out.  The lesson pages, handouts, worksheets, reflection questions that I create for my academic classes will also find their ways into new Sadler Online Academy classes.

I have created core concept videos in my main YouTube channel on quite a few of these texts and authors, so if you poke around in my Core Concept Playlist, you'll find the ones I have available already on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and (coming soon) Kierkegaard.

I'm in the process this month of creating additional videos for my students specifically on Cicero, Augustine, Hobbes, and Rousseau.  Later on in the term, I'll be shooting new material on all of the other thinkers covered (with the exception of the Chinese philosophy material).

Those new core concept videos will be released over the months to come.  I would like to point out that one of the perks for my Patreon supporters is that they get advance viewing access to new video material before the general public.  (So for example, for the last month, they've had access to all the new Kierkegaard videos I'll be releasing this month).

So quite a lot of course resource production on the docket for these coming months!