My eight week ethics course starts up Monday night. Here's the course description:
This course is designed to introduce you to the philosophical inquiry into moral human behavior, primarily as understood from authors in the West, from Aristotle to Kant to Mill and beyond. Some of the questions this class will address are: What sort of life ought humans to live? What sort of community most actualizes what it means to be human? What sort of ethical ways of life have been most helpful and/or enduring? Many more will be raised by your own reading and by class discussion to further challenge your own conclusions and your understandings of the philosophers and the ethical models we will read and read about. The emphasis of the class will be to understand the various ethical models we will encounter, and philosophical ethical inquiry itself, as specific ways of living, and not merely as intellectually stimulating exercises; and, more generally, to see that general philosophical inquiry is, itself, a way of life. By the end of the course through reading, class participation, quizzes, and writing you will be able to articulate some of the most important ideas held by various historical figures, and some of their most important implications, as well as have developed a framework within which to both articulate and incarnate your own views of some of these important ideas, and answers to some of the questions, we will discuss.
There's still time to enroll, though I think there's only one open slot left.
Here are the texts:
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr by Joe Sachs (Focus, 2002)
Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, tr by Michael Chase (Belknap, 2004)
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, tr by Mary Gregor (Cambridge, 1997)
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. by George Sher (Hackett, 1979)
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, tr by R. G. Bury (Prometheus, 1990)
Aw, you should have just stuck with Aristotle, Aquinas' commentary on him, and maybe Harry V. Jaffa's interpretive work on the subject and told them everything else in ethics is utterly derivative. That's enough to fill 8 weeks alone. Heck, that's enough to fill a lifetime.
Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez at October 22, 2005 03:47 PM