Classics: The Divine Plato

See Schedule of Courses for specific titles.

Co located with CLAS 1990 and PHIL 3990 C; total combined enrollments = 25 PACE students by permission and override Special Topics courses cannot carry CC designations.

https://www.uvm.edu/~jbailly/courses/161plato/PlatoScheduleSpring21.html

If we do our tasks as planned, this course should change your life and how you view philosophy. This course covers the entire gamut of Plato's works, from short ethical works about 'virtue' to how he tried to defeat relativism to why he thinks the whole world is made of triangles to what pleasure is to why he thinks the only real things are 'ideas.' It starts out kind of slow with a somewhat simple ethical framework confined to ethics, but the dialogues expand into extended discussion of what eventually comes to be known as epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, psychology, why he is super concerned about the so-called 3rd man, and more.

This class combines lecture, discussion, and presentations. There's a fair bit of reading required. Required book: Plato, Complete works, edited by Cooper: ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0872203492. You will be much better off if you have taken a CLAS course or a PHIL course: either one will help you enter Plato.

Weekly one page analyses of arguments form the backbone of your assignments. Once per semester summary and presentation of a scholarly article about Platonic material. Maybe a midterm and a final exam with short id's, short essays, identification of passages, some facts: things you should know if you have taken a course on Plato. The midterm and final will not, however, count for as much as the weekly analyses and summary/presentations.