The Great Conversation

This course is a relay through twenty-five centuries of Western philosophy, read in order: each thinker inherits the problem the last one couldn't solve, tries to solve it, and leaves a new problem for the next. The chain runs from Thales and the Presocratics through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics; Augustine and Aquinas; Descartes and the fork between rationalists and empiricists; Locke and the Enlightenment ideas behind the American founding; Kant's hinge; the great inside critics — Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche — and into the still-open questions of the present. Where its paired survey, The Examined Life, is organized by the question, this course is organized by time: the student watches the same questions fought out across the centuries.

The student's job is two verbs: inherit — take each argument seriously from the inside, as its author meant it — and discern — then find the crack, because the failures are the engine that forces the next move. The course is admiring of the enterprise itself and steelmans each thinker from the inside before it judges — then it says where it lands and why. No tradition is retired by the march of progress; that story is false, and the course depends on the student not believing it. But particular arguments do lose, and when one does the house says so and shows the work. Readings draw on public-domain primary texts in translation, with real, attributed quotations only. The capstone unit, You're a Link, places the student at the live end of the chain: the conversation has not stopped in twenty-five centuries, and his move is next.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.