Ancient Philosophy (Plato)

This course will be devoted to a careful reading of a small number of texts from a major figure in ancient philosophy. The goal of the course is twofold: First, it is designed to acquaint students with one of the seminal figures of our tradition in more than a superficial way, forcing us to slow our usual pace of reading and to read almost painfully carefully with a view to understanding the thinker as he wrote and as he understood himself and not as a stage in an historical development. Second, the course will introduce and encourage this kind of careful reading. The text for Fall 2013 will be Plato’s Timaeus.