Philosophy 25A

This course is an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. We will take as our central theme the crisis of intellectual authority in the 5th century BCE, with a special emphasis on Plato’s reference to “an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 607b 5-6). So doing will prompt us towards the following questions: What is the soul? How is human thought related to the natural world and to the divine? How do these relations bear on one’s ability to lead a good life? What is philosophy and why does it stand in an agonistic relation with poetic discourse? How are we to conceive the interplay between mythos and logos? Philosophical texts from Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic period, will be brought into a critical encounter with Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Iliad, and Greek tragedy