Plato: Symposium
Course Description
Summary
It is 416 BCE. A group of Athenian men are gathered together for a party, a celebration, a symposium. Among the company are the tragic playwright Agathon, Agathon’s lover Pausanias, the beautiful but doomed Phaedrus, the comic playwright Aristophanes, the doctor Eryximachus, and the (also perhaps doomed) philosopher Socrates. Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea, puts in a surprise appearance. Alcibiades, the glamor boy of Athens, makes a late, splashy, gate-crashy arrival. There are the usual snacks and drinks. For entertainment, the guests give speeches on eros—erotic desire and love.
For this seven week course, we will engage in a close study of Plato’s Symposium, a dialogue that invites us to make some philosophical sense of the tangled mystery of human desire. Among our questions: Is erotic love a physical, psychological, or spiritual phenomenon? Do we desire the person or the ideal? Can human eros ever really be satisfied? In addition to a close reading and philosophical analysis of the Symposium, we’ll engage with a range of responses to this work.
Learning Outcomes
- • Develop skills in close reading, textual analysis, and critical interpretation
• Engage thoughtfully with philosophical questions and philosophical views
• Deepen and complicate understanding of Greek antiquity and its receptions
• Develop your ideas in writing using appropriate evidence and support