Social and Political Philosophy I

A close-reading course built around Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, where the goal is less to survey "ancient political thought" than to wrestle seriously with the questions those texts force on you: what a good life looks like, whether morality is one thing or many, and why you should bother doing the right thing at all. Expect heavy reading in primary sources, constant short essays and in-class discussion, two term papers, and presentations — the workload is split between philosophical argument and English-language writing, so you're being graded on how you think and how you put it on the page. It doubles as the bridge out of ENG 101/102 into real humanities writing, and sets up the second-semester continuation that carries the same method into modern political philosophy.