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This class examines a variety of answers to the ancient question: How do I live a good life? We’ll engage with thinkers from diverse traditions across time and space as we clarify our own understanding of what makes life worth living and as we articulate a more developed conception of the good life.

The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world?

Since its inception, film has been used for propaganda - disseminating information with a particular slant, whether subtle or obvious - by regimes and independent players across the political spectrum. As the means of production and circuits of distribution become ever more accessible to individuals, we have moved from an era of focused agitprop into a new era of diffused disinformation.

Viewed from the outside, the French-speaking world offers enticing images of beauty, pleasure, and freedom. From the inside, however, it is a complicated, often contradictory world where implicit codes and values shape the most basic aspects of daily life. This course will give you an insider’s perspective on a cultural and communicative system whose ideas, customs, and belief systems are surprisingly different from your own.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are” –Brillat-Savarin

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) describes his own work in metaphysics by analogy with Copernicus’s revolution in astronomy. He constructs a system of thought that attempts to move beyond the empiricism of Hume and the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff. His method – critique – and his theory – transcendental idealism – have profoundly influenced all subsequent philosophy.

Why is a Mayan food, chocolate, such a high-stake product in French-speaking countries ?

French literature and film have always reciprocally inspired one another – as early as 1897, Lumière represented the main characters of Hugo’s Les Misérables. This course will offer students the opportunity to analyze literary representations of women and their film adaptations in terms of intermediality and intertextuality. Adaptations will include: La Princesse de Clèves (La Fayette/Sauder), La Religieuse (Diderot/Rivette), La Noire de… (Sembène/Sembène), La Prisonnière/La Captive (Proust/Akerman). Students will focus on various adaptation strategies and approaches.

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.

How does one’s social positionality affect one’s status as a knower? Who is heard? Who is believed? This seven-week course is focused on questions of justice and power in relation to knowledge. We will engage with recent work in social epistemology—philosophical theories of belief and knowledge—with an emphasis on feminist epistemologies, anti-racist epistemologies, and epistemologies of resistance. These approaches stress that knowers are embodied, situated, embedded in communities, and have multiple, intersecting social identities.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics underwent a vast expansion, into new, exciting, and increasingly counter-intuitive realms. The subject risked mystification and mutual incomprehensibility between experts in different sub-fields. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of French mathematicians, under the pseudonym Bourbaki, undertook an ultimately successful program to use the foundation of set theory to put all of mathematics onto a common conceptual and logical foundation.

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx