CSCH 3012 Seminar on Philosophy & Literature
Epicurean and Stoic Philosophers offered practical instruction on how to live your life. Thinkers cultivated new methods of self-reliance based on developing rational control over the body, emotions and desires, and anxieties of the mind. Humans are confronted by radical contingency and change in their culture and history. Literature read will deal with values, their transmission from cultures and civilizations, and about what you and your history stood for, examinations of the hopes and doubts of reason, self-consciousness and the realization of freedom. Philosophical writings from Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson and novels by Pears, Stendhal, Gide, Yourcenar, Pirzig, Voltaire, Gardner, Camus, Barth.