This year’s HI Seminar explores the question: Can we know reality? In the Fall we explore the work of various thinkers in Antiquity on this question, turning to Modernity in the Spring 2024.
For Plato’s Socrates (469–399 B.C), knowledge of reality was anchored in philosophical conversation rooted in friendship. For Plato (429?–347 B.C), Socrates’ student, reality was ultimately transcendent: unchanging, immaterial Forms which transcend the world of space and time and explain our material world. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), by contrast, thought the sensible world provided the key to understanding reality; but he also seemed to think that the human mind’s capacity to know reality gives us reason to think we persist after death.
By even sharper contrast, the ancient Skeptic Sextus Empiricus (2nd/3rd century A.D.) foreshadows arguments seen in postmodern philosophers: there is, it seems, no ultimate truth, but just perspectives. Finally, we finish by considering how St. Augustine (354-430 AD) responds to the ancient Skeptics and aims to vindicate a Platonic belief in the transcendent. He also anticipates influential arguments against skepticism that we see in Rene Descartes (1596–1650). Of course, Modern Philosophers in various ways, offer key challenges to each of these views.
Along the way, a major theme will be that how we think about reality has major implications for questions such as “how should I live?” “do I cease to exist after death?” and “Is there a God?”
- Week 1: Plato’s Socrates: selections from the Meno
- Week 2: Plato: arguments for the Forms in Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus
- Week 3: Aristotle: Selections from De Anima II and III
- Week 4: Sextus Empiricus: Selections from Outlines of Pyrrhonism
- Week 5: St. Augustine: Selections from Against the Academicians and On the Trinity
All undergraduates, graduate, and medical students are welcome.
Email jprather@houstoninstitute.org to RSVP.
