This is the webpage for an old course, Philosophy 301: Ancient Philosophy, from Fall 2010. For a list of courses I have taught or will teach in the future, look here.
I will have extra office hours on Monday from 2-3 pm.
Please remember to fill out online SEIs for the course if you have not already.
Review session in class on Thursday: come prepared to ask questions.
Read Categories, De Interpretatione 7, and Physics Book I.
REVISED: I have revised question 14 and question 3.
REVISED: I have removed questions 18 and 20.
This is a study guide for the final exam. The final will be in our usual lecture hall, Caldwell Lab 0120, on Wednesday, December 8th, from 11:30 am to 1:18 pm. It will be closed book, closed notes. I will provide blue books. →
Read Republic IV 427d-end, Republic V.471c-end, Republic VI.504d-end, Republic VII.
Due on Tuesday, November 23rd. Answer in no more than 660 words or 2 pages, double-spaced, 1 inch margins, ordinary 12 pt font (e.g., Times). →
For next Tuesday, read the Phaedo.
At least one person was confused about this, so I thought I should clarify: the exam will contain a small selection from the 25 questions on the study guide; it will not contain all 25 questions!
You can expect something like 10-15 short answer questions and 2-4 essay questions.
There is no new reading for October 26, because we will be having the exam.
There is also no new reading for October 28th; we will continue to discuss the Euthyphro.
Next week, we will discuss the Phaedo.
I will have an extra office hour on Monday, from 1:30-2:30pm.
This is a study guide for the midterm in class on Tuesday, October 26th. The midterm will be closed book, closed notes. I will provide blue books. You will have the entire class period to complete the midterm. →
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has two nice articles that, taken together, should give you a sense of the current state of play when it comes to Zeno’s paradoxes:
Read the Apology and the Euthyphro, both in Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy. I will begin by discussing the Apology.
FYI, Lindsay’s office hours are Tues 11:15-12:15 and Wed 3:30-4:30, in University Hall 214. This information is also now on the syllabus.
Thanks to Skyler Martin for the link.
For next time, please read chapters 13, 14, and 16.
For next week, read the Euthyphro and the Apology. I will talk about the Apology first and the Euthyphro second.
I mentioned in class two other dialogues that are worth reading: the Laches and the Charmides. Neither is in our text.
For next Tuesday, October 12th, read chapter 12, on Zeno, in Philosophy Before Socrates. For next Thursday, October 15th 14th, read chapters 13, 14, and 16.
Tuesday’s lecture will be devoted to Parmenides and Zeno. Thursday’s lecture will be devoted to the Pluralists—Anaxagoras and Empedocles—and the Atomists—Leucippus and Democritus.
And that will be that for Presocratic Philosophy.
WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.→
In class I mentioned Quine’s paper “Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis” (off-campus link). Section I is relevant to our passages 10.64, 10.65, and 10.66. Later sections are rough going, but are relevant to issues that will arise in Plato and Aristotle.
No new readings for October 7th. But you should be rereading Parmenides.
The OSU Undergraduate Philosophy Club meets tonight, Wednesday Oct 6, at 7:30 pm in University Hall 347.→
Present and evaluate Anaximander’s account of the coming to be of hot and cold from the ARCHE in no more than 2 pages (650 words), double spaced, 12 pt font, 1 inch margins. Due in class on October 12th. Click through for more details→
Parmenides is a hard nut to crack. It can help to read other people’s attempts to crack that nut. McKirahan’s discussion is a good place to start. Here are two articles that are considerably more challenging, but might be helpful→
For next Tuesday, read chapters 10 and 11 of Philosophy Before Socrates.
I read a few testimonia in lecture that are not in Philosophy Before Socrates. Also, I mentioned in class an article on the history of the Greek concept of the psyche.→
There are no new readings for tomorrow. Continue to read (and reread) chapters 4-6. We will skip Xenophanes (chapter 7).
For next Tuesday, I want you to start reading through the chapters in McKirahan on the Milesians. In particular, chapters 4, 5, and 6.→
I want you to spend most of your time in this course struggling directly with primary sources, using class lecture and discussion to help guide your focus. But there are several online resources that you may find useful along the way. Here are a few→
The course divides into three chronological chunks 1. Presocratic Philosophy 2. Socrates and Plato 3. Aristotle
We will work through the following texts in order, planning to spend roughly three weeks on each section. →
It appears that the Barnes and Noble OSU University Bookstore now has both books.
Please read the first two chapters (pp. 1–19) of Philosophy Before Socrates before the first day of class.
I seem to have screwed up the textbook order. The bookstores have one of the two required books, Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, but not the other, Philosophy before Socrates.→
The required texts for the course are
If buying a used copy of Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy, be certain you are buying the 3rd edition.
Fall 2010, TuTh 12:30-2:18.
An introduction to Ancient Greek Philosophy, from the death of Aristotle in 322 BCE to its traditional beginning in 585 BCE. We will cover Aristotle, several Presocratics, Socrates, and Plato. We will focus on issues in natural philosophy and metaphysics.
If you want to see what previous versions of this course looked like, follow the links from the page that lists every course I have taught to old course webpages.
And a silly flyer is here.