This course will carry us across much of the terrain of Western philosophy.  Beginning in the metaphysical and ethical Mediterranean (read: Ancient Greece and Rome), we will explore the theories and recommended practices of Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Epictetus.  From there we will proceed to the modern period, represented, for our purposes at least, by the epistemology of Rene Descartes and the sociopolitical thought of Karl Marx.  To conclude, we will investigate the many incarnations of Existentialism, primarily of the Danish (Kierkegaard), German (Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger), and French (Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) varieties.

Required Texts

• Plato: Symposium.  Translated by Benjamin Jowett.  Prentice Hall, 1956.  ($9)
• Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy.  Translated by Donald Cress.  Hackett, 1993.  ($6)
• Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre.  Edited by Walter Kaufman.  Plume, 1975.  ($12)