Graduate Program (& Advanced Certificate) Status
Mandatory-Elective | |
Mandatory-Elective | |
Elective | |
Elective | |
Elective |
The core class (2 credits) can be taken without the tutorial (2 credits) but not vice versa.
For the core class:
The course attempts at a systematic introduction to the main problems and the various proposals to solve them in the late antique and medieval philosophical schools. The historical starting point is 176 AD, when Emperor Marcus Aurelius founded four chairs of philosophy in Athens which will end in the fifteenth century. After an introductory part describing the historical and social framework of philosophizing, the course focusses on the main problems and themes that occupied the minds of the philosophers. The course will consist of a lecture series and of tutorials/seminars. Students will be required to read selections of secondary literature and discuss the arising themes.
Twelve lectures will be given in four modules. I. The historical and social background of late antique and medieval philosophy; II. Organon: the methods and instruments of philosophizing; III. First philosophy: ontology and epistemology; IV. Anthropology and natural philosophy.
For the tutorial:
A selection from the great philosophical texts of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages will be given for reading in English translation. At the tutorials/seminars these texts will be read and discussed with reference to the subjects and the secondary literature discussed at the lectures. Ideally, students will be required to prepare discussion papers about each reading, the presentation of which will be followed by a debate moderated by the instructors.
For the core class:
Students will become acquainted with the structure of philosophical teaching, inherited from Classical Antiquity, of philosophical learning in the Late Antique Mediterranean, and as it was continued in Byzantium and in the Latin West, with a modicum of insight into medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophy. They will gain an insight into philosophy as a universal elite culture spreading across religious beliefs and will be confronted to divergent and conflicting historiographic views in the secondary literature. The course intends to present the philosophical schools as different methods of investigation and school curricula instead of presenting them as dogmatic systems. The course particularly aims at helping the students to increase their critical acumen.
For the tutorial:
Students will be acquainted with some of the foundational texts of the philosophical heritage of the three main areas covered: Late Antique, Byzantine and Medieval Latin philosophy, with some addition of medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophical texts. They will be able to assess independently the place of those texts in the general philosophical culture and to assess critically the individual philosophical themes treated.
For the core class:
Reading assignments, class summaries and questions accounted for by weekly class journals 75%; class participation: 25%.
For the tutorial:
Active participation in the classes and discussions: 50%; presentation of discussion papers: 50%.