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 neutral on every position and admiring of the enterprise itself; nothing is treated as "defeated," and no side is installed. 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.