Do you know yourself, and what would it mean to do so?
What does it mean to ‘examine your life’?
What is the fundamental character of life on this earth – and does it even make sense to talk this way?
What is desire?
Does life have a purpose?
Do we do things for reasons?
Why do we want what we want?
Are you good? What would it mean, to be a good person?
Can you be good if you just set your mind to it?
What does it mean to be a true friend?
Is there philosophy in the Bible?
Doesn’t the Apostle Paul talk about being ruined by philosophy?

These are some of the one-hundred-or-so questions, raised by ancient thinkers (Jews, Greeks, and Christians), that we will study in this course.

We will look at the most enduring answers given to these questions by the greatest thinkers in the Western tradition up to the end of the Apostolic period. We take seriously the contribution of the New Testament as further ancient thinking addressed to the answering of these questions. (This will draw us into consideration of many central issues in philosophy: truth, justice, love, causation, the soul, politics, the individual, reason, etc.)

WHO NEEDS PHILOSOPHY?

It may be apparent, then, that the purpose of this course is to furnish students with philosophical resources for the living of their lives. But why not put it in the way the ancient world put it?

Do people need ‘philosophical resources for the living of their lives’? No. They simply need to know the truth, know what can be known, about the most basic questions of life.

The knowledge we study is knowledge of life — practical knowledge, as relevant to daily life as knowledge of the seasons is relevant to farming. We need to see the world as it is simply because not to do so is to be at risk of making dangerous miss-steps in life.

And isn’t it true that today many people are at risk? Their education entirely ignores these questions — as if they were the ‘concerns of philosophers’, or as if the answers we naturally give to What is desire and What is a friend were perfectly trustworthy.

But they are not trustworthy, since they are generally the answers furnished by the prevailing culture, filtered by a modern world-view that has turned against the Christian tradition and its wisdom, the wisdom of the ancients.

WHO WE STUDY

The texts and thinkers to be considered in this term are the book of Ecclesiastes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, and the authors of the New Testament, including Jesus, who like Socrates wrote nothing but taught much about these very questions.