Ancient Philosophy

Ancient Greek philosophy is where the basic questions of Western thought get posed for the first time: what is the world made of, what can we actually know, and what does it mean to live well? You'll work through the Presocratics, then spend most of the semester reading Plato and Aristotle directly (Euthyphro, Meno, Republic, Nicomachean Ethics), writing two essays that reconstruct and critique their arguments rather than just summarize them. It pairs naturally with PHIL 101 and sets up the medieval and modern philosophy sequence, but the real payoff is learning to read a primary text closely — a skill the rest of the philosophy curriculum assumes you have.