This is my second time around teaching Foundations, and in this interim between semesters, I've put quite a bit of thought into redesigning the course. In a later blog post, I'll discuss what sorts of activities and assignments I've got lined up for my students. But in this one - since I now my readers, viewers, and subscribers are always interested to know what the required readings are for the course, I thought I'd set them out here, adding a few reflections about why I made those selections.
So with no further ado, here's the list of thinkers and texts, indexed to the weeks and days of the term:
The Readings For Foundations In Philosophy
Week 1, Day 2 - Plato's ApologyWeek 2, Day 1 - Plato's Meno
Week 2, Day 2 - Plato's Republic book 6 and 7 (selections)
Week 3, Day 1 - Aristotle's Metaphysics book 1
Week 3, Day 2 - Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics book 1-2
Week 4, Day 1 - Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics books 3-4
Week 4, Day 2 - Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics book 3 6 and 7
Week 5, Day 1 - Cicero's On The Ends book 1
Week 5, Day 2 - Cicero's On The Ends book 3, Seneca's Letter 65
Week 6, Day 1 - Cicero's On Fate, Lucretius' On the Order of Things books 2 and 4 (selections)
Week 6, Day 2 - Epictetus Discourses (selections)
Week 7, Day 1 - Augustine City of God book 5 (selections), Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will book 1
Week 7, Day 2 - Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will book 2
Week 8, Day 1 - Anselm's Proslogion
Week 8, Day 2 - Anselm's On Freedom of Choice, and On The Harmony book 3 (selections)
Week 9, Day 1 - Al Ghazali's Religious and Moral Writings (selections)
Week 9, Day 2 - Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, question 2 and question 22
Week 10, Day 1 - Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, question 82-83 and Prima Secundae Partis, question 2
Week 10, Day 2 - Rene Descartes' Meditations parts 1-2, and Discourse on Method parts 2-3 (selections)
Week 11, Day 1 - Rene Descartes' Meditations parts 3-4
Week 11, Day 2 - Rene Descartes' Meditations parts 5-6, and Discourse on Method part 5 (selections)
Week 12, Day 1 - David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding parts 2-5
Week 12, Day 2 - David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding parts 6-9
Week 13, Day 1 - Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, ch. 1-2, 4, 6-7 (selections)
Week 14, Day 1- Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil ch. 1-2
Week 14, Day 2 - Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil ch. 5 and 7
Week 15, Day 1 - Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem (selections)
In order to provide some context and continuity for the theme of the human will, I'll also be assigning some selections from Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, part 2 as supplementary readings for my students.
Why These Particular Selections
Some of these thinkers and texts were assigned to my students last semester. I've added a good bit more Plato, switched the Aristotle around a bit, and added the Lucretius, Seneca, and Epictetus to give a bit more Epicurean and Stoic material. I've also added a further text by Cicero, On Fate.
We did selections from Augustine's City of God last term, and we'll still do a bit, but I've switched the main text to his On Free Choice of the Will. I made a similar switch with Descartes' keeping bits of the Discourse on Method, which we studied last semester, but focusing primarily on the Meditations.
The al-Ghazali, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche are new additions to the readings. I've dropped the Thomas Hobbes and the selections from Chinese philosophy that I'd assigned last semester. We're keeping the Wollstonecraft and Arendt selections from last term, but giving just one day to each.
The Foundations class is supposed to introduce students not only to a variety of perspectives in philosophy, but also to at least several distinct philosophical methodologies. It also needs to lead the students into some study of the key themes, problems, and issues of philosophy. There is a mandate about some of the content - students must encounter either Plato or Aristotle, a thinker in the Catholic tradition, a non-Western thinker, and a "contemporary" thinker (for me, that's Arendt)
Last time around - last semester - I felt like we had sufficient coverage of some of those themes, the nature of virtue, distinction between right and wrong, or the value of relationships. Others - like freedom or determinism of the will, the distinction between appearance and reality, arguments about God's existence and nature - those got far too short shrift. I also thought that we needed a bit more Plato at the start to confront students with a robust philosophical methodology right at the start of the term.
If there is one theme that really does dominate and hold all (or at least most) of the readings of the term together, this time around it is the nature of the human will, and its tricky involvement with freedom and determinism. When you scratch the surface of that formulation, what really is involved is another key metaphysical and moral theme - that of causality.
By the end of the term, the students will have engaged with several important philosophical traditions and perspectives. In the ancient period, we have those of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and a critical eclectic like Cicero. They're also engaging with great minds of the medieval period - Augustine, Anselm, and al-Ghazali, Aquinas - each presenting a distinctive approach engaging with the problems ancients raised in new monotheistic frameworks.
From the modern period, the students will study four philosophers of major significance and influence - Descartes, Hume, Wollstonecraft, and Nietzsche. And then we have Arendt, who will have been with us from the very beginning, to bring matters to a close.
Who I Wish We Could Also Include
It is always tough to decide which thinkers and texts to include in a class like this. On paper, we get 15 weeks, but that never ends up being the case. It's more like 14 weeks at best. Even if we had the full 15 weeks, it wouldn't be near enough to cover what one would like to.
I've been debating about whether I could sneak some Epicurus into the curriculum - at the very least the famous tetrapharmacos and his formulation of an argument from evil. That might be doable still. Less likely to be able to be fitted in are a few selections from Hume's Treatise Of Human Nature that would provide a nice supplement.
But who else would I want to include in a longer version of this class? What texts, and what thinkers, would fit into and complement the key themes of this course? Before I came up with the present reading list, I developed a longer one, which I then winnowed down by eliminating some of these thinkers and texts. Here's who they were:
But who else would I want to include in a longer version of this class? What texts, and what thinkers, would fit into and complement the key themes of this course? Before I came up with the present reading list, I developed a longer one, which I then winnowed down by eliminating some of these thinkers and texts. Here's who they were:
- Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
- Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (selections)
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
Given the opportunity, I think I would want to bring Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan back into the reading list - at least selections from it. I'd also include some selections from the following:
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees
- Benedict Spinoza, Ethics
- John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (selections)
- Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (selections)
- John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (selections) and On Liberty
- William James, The Will To Believe
That's already quite a lot, adding in those people. Quite likely, to do them justice, we'd need the equivalent of two semesters. And in order to be comprehensive, I'd be tempted to add and teach yet more! But alas, we have the academic frameworks we have to work with. So, if I'm going to develop more curricula on a wider range of thinkers - at least in this introductory manner - for the time being it will have to be in my own private Teachable course site.
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