Abraham Anderson

Philosophy began with the Greeks as the pursuit of freedom of mind—as a rebellion against bondage to conventional belief. But is freedom of mind possible? And to what does it amount? This course, the first half of a yearlong sequence, focuses on the different ways the Greek philosophers and their Roman heirs understood freedom of mind. We will travel from the pre-Socratics through Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. Students will be expected to come to each class with a written question on the reading, which I may ask them to read aloud at the beginning of class in order to stimulate discussion. They may also be asked to participate in brief group presentations of the reading. The writing requirements for the class will have two components. The first of these will be made up of a short paragraph on the reading for each class and each group conference and should include the written question on the reading; the rest of the paragraph should either develop this question further or pose a further question or questions about the reading. At the end of the semester, you will be expected to submit a log of these short paragraphs, with your three favorites at the beginning of the document. The second writing requirement will be for a paper, or papers, outlining a portion of the reading and posing questions along the way. Through discussion, we will decide on the focus of these papers.

This course will continue the investigation undertaken in the fall course. For a description, see Freedom of Mind: Ancient Philosophy, fall semester; theme and writing requirements will be the same as for that course. Our focus will shift, however, to medieval and modern philosophy, with attention to Averroes (Ibn Rush’d), Montaigne, Descartes, and Shaftesbury. Either course may be taken independently, but students are, of course, invited to take both.

By nature, humans need something more than nature—custom or convention, or what we nowadays call “culture”—to constitute a community. What is this something more, and why do we need it? Are “cultures” completely sealed off from each other and mutually incomprehensible, or can they be understood as responding to universal human needs? Are they pure products of freedom and creativity, always subject to modulation and transformation, or are they like a kind of inescapable fate? We shall tackle this topic with the help of Plato’s Laws.

Nietzsche, in the Preface to The Genealogy of Morals, begins by attacking “English moralists.” By “English moralists” he means, I propose, David Hume in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. After reading the Preface and Part One of the Genealogy, we shall turn to Hume’s Enquiry in order to understand Nietzsche’s criticism and to see whether we think it is justified. Students will be required to bring a written question to each class and to present short sections of the reading. Writing requirements will consist of a log of the written questions, two outlines of portions of the reading that they present in class with questions and objections, and a conference paper.

René Descartes can be seen as the founder of modern philosophy. He carried out much of his intellectual life through correspondence, and one of his most important correspondents was Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. A central topic of their correspondence is the “union of mind and body”; i.e., how thought is related to matter but also how the perspective of science is related to the passions and human life. This problem is posed by Descartes’ treatment of mind and body in his Meditations, which led Elizabeth to begin the correspondence. Their exchanges led Descartes to write his last book, The Passions of the Soul, on psychology, the passions, virtue, and vice. We will begin by reading the Meditations, then focus on the correspondence between Descartes and Elizabeth, and finally turn to the Passions.

In the history of economic thought, one of the classic topics has been the “Adam Smith problem,” the problem of how Smith—whose The Wealth of Nations was thought to teach that selfishness is, and ought to be, the primary motive of human behavior—could also have written The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which makes sympathy and benevolence central to human moral psychology. In this course, we shall attempt to understand whether there really is an “Adam Smith problem.” We shall do so by beginning before Smith, with Shaftesbury‘s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit, which teaches that human beings are fundamentally sociable, and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which argues for the political and economic value of selfishness. We shall then go on to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. Our focus will not be on economic theory. Rather, we shall be interested in the question of human nature and its relevance to politics and political economy—and, for example, to disagreements among American “conservatives,” many of whom defend the virtue of selfishness, and American “liberals,” many of whom wish to regard human beings as fundamentally sociable and who wish to cultivate a universal benevolence. Reading these four books slowly and carefully may take us the whole year.

We live at a time when fanaticism, religious and otherwise, has become a subject of great concern. This is not a new problem: Western literature and philosophy have been concerned with fanaticism since the beginning, and we cannot understand the way the problem of fanaticism appears to us now without going back to the earlier discussions and transformations of that question. The reading list, which may be modified, is Euripides, Bacchae; Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedrus, Lucretius, On the Nature of Things; St. Paul, Epistle to the Romans; Montaigne, “On Presumption”; Shaftesbury, Characteristics; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,” “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” “Of Parties,” History of England, Vol. 5, an excerpt on the New Model Army; Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer; Lessing, Nathan the Wise; Bentham, “Anarchistical Fallacies”; Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984. During the fall semester, students will meet with the instructor weekly for individual conferences with some opportunities for small-group meetings; in the spring, we will normally meet every other week.

People often talk about the problem of evil, but what do they mean? In its religious version, it is the problem: If there is a good and all-powerful God, why does He allow evil? In its nonreligious version, the problem is: Why are humans evil? And can evil be overcome? We will track the problem of evil from the death camps to the notion of sin and of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Modern discussions of gender and sexuality have a predecessor in the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece, which have informed recent thought on the topic. Of the Greek discussions, we shall focus on just a few. We shall begin with poetry by Sappho, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Euripides’ Bacchae. We shall go on to Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, and Book Five of Plato’s Republic.

Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is a book about religion, but it is also a book about Enlightenment—or how to build a rational society; for this purpose, religion, in Kant’s view, is indispensable. We shall study how Kant seeks to reform Christianity to make it compatible with a rational society and what the limits are on this enterprise. The topic is of interest nowadays, when the attempt of Kant and others to make religion compatible with Enlightenment is under challenge, and religion has once again come into some tension with science and the hope for progress founded on collective rationality.

Where does the modern world come from? In large part, it is the product of philosophy that took on a political role it had never had before: the role of founding a new social order organized around science and technology and which, it was hoped, would tame the religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries. We will begin by reading Francis Bacon’s Preface and Proemium to the Grand Instauration, as well as parts of his Advancement of Learning, in which he sets out the plan for the new science and technology and seeks to make it politically and religiously acceptable, and his New Atlantis, a sketch of the new scientific-technological order. Then, we shall go on to read Descartes’ Discourse on Method, in which he combines the plan for a new physics and a new technological order with a new metaphysics of God and the soul and a new ethics of self-determination—different from the ethics of the ancient Stoics and Skeptics on which it draws, as well as from the ethics of Aristotle, Plato, and Epicurus and from Christian conceptions of virtue and vice. We shall then study Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, which is at once a scientific study of religion and a proposal for a new social order, in which religion will serve simply to support morality and obedience to the law while not interfering with science and philosophy. In group conference, we will study the ancient philosophy from which the moderns take their departure: selections from Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Seneca. In the spring semester, we will turn to modern reactions to the earlier modern attempts to remake the world. We will begin with Shaftesbury, who seeks to save Plato’s defense of moral teleology from both Christian rejection of the world and the attacks of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza by appealing to comedy and the sense of the beautiful. We will then turn to Hume, who seeks to invent a new common sense based on custom and feeling. Finally, we will consider Rousseau’s attack on the arts and sciences and his attempt to reconstruct the doctrine of political right without appealing to the natural order. In group conference, we will continue reading the ancients, especially Plato and Lucretius, to consider how those authors draw on them and react against them.

Since Socrates, philosophy has understood itself as therapy—of “opinion” (Socrates, Plato), of anxiety and passion (the Stoa), of superstition (the Epicureans), and of dogmatism (the Pyrrhonian skeptics and the New Academy). This conception of philosophy receded in the Middle Ages—when philosophy in Christian Europe was conceived of as a “handmaiden to theology”—but returned in the Renaissance and continued to be important in the Enlightenment. Among the moderns, thinkers who understand philosophy as involving therapy include Montaigne, Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Kant, as well as some in the 20th century. In the fall semester, we shall focus on the ancients; in the spring, on the moderns.

Is there truth over and above the point of view of the individual or group? This topic received considerable discussion in the philosophy of Plato, whose treatment of the topic remains indispensable for grappling with it. We shall read the Euthyphro, on piety; The Apology, in which Socrates defends himself against the charge of subverting the religion of Athens; and selections from The Republic, in which Socrates considers whether justice is just a matter of convention. We shall then go on to the Theaetetus, on knowledge, and the Sophist, on falsehood.

Can society be rational? The Enlightenment was the attempt by philosophers to overcome superstition with the help of science. At the end of the 18th century, philosophy defeated religion and took its place as a moral and political guide. Philosophy then started acting like religion: It offered prophecies about the future, sought to explain reality to all of humanity, and offered promises of salvation and consolation for suffering. Was this a big mistake? The course will begin by studying philosophy’s campaign against religion, which it carried out by mixing promises for the control of nature with the mockery of superstition and the promise of certainty. The course will then turn to philosophy’s attempt to shoulder the burdens of religion and where that has left us.