PHIL 215 - Human Nature, Happiness, and Virtue: Ethical Theory from Socrates to the Stoics

FC ARHU

4 credits
According to Socrates, there is no philosophical issue more pressing than the question: How should we live our lives? This course surveys the most influential responses to Socrates’s question in the Greek philosophical tradition, beginning with his own answer as represented in Plato’s early masterpiece Protagoras. We then turn to the most celebrated texts in ancient Greek philosophy: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Along the way we also investigate Epicurus’s hedonism and the attempts by various Stoics to resuscitate Socrates’s moral philosophy.