Our concern in this class will be with the idea of virtue ethics, which dominates Western Culture beginning with Homer and Aristotle. Virtue ethics is one of the preeminent human ideas of freedom and arguably has no rival until the eighteenth century, at which point a number of other models challenge its hegemony—such as the idea of rights, deontological (duty-based) ethics, moral consequentialism, rational choice theory, etc.– Our course breaks down into two sections: Part I starts out with some short selections from Homer’s Iliad, From there we’ll move on to read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Sophocles’ Antigone. Next will be some shorter essays by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, and we’ll conclude this first half of the class with a reading of St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on the virtues, arguably the last and most complete account of this concept in Western history. – In Part II we will take up three major works of English literature whose plot and rhetoric is shaped by (and, to an extent, reacts against) the apparent demise of the virtues: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Some of these readings will be accompanied by some short critical texts.
Requirements: 1 four page and 2 six-eight page essays; active participation in class.
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