Spring Quarter

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According to Aristotle, ethical virtue is similar to athletic and musical virtue: it’s an exercise of skill. This course considers several ways that “know how” bears on philosophical questions of ethics, including: Why be moral? What is it to be happy? How is morality related to freedom and control in action? What is the value and future of work and leisure, especially in view of climate and technological change?

In this course we will read, from beginning to end, the greatest work in the western philosophical tradition and, arguably, the best book ever written: Plato's Republic. We will examine Plato's discussion of topics in ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of art. This class will be a seminar, attendance and regular participation in class discussion is mandatory.

n the age of social media, we tend to associate human self-love with the myth of Narcissus, trapped in the love of his self-reflected image. Self-love, however, was conceived of much more positively in Antiquity. Aristotle and the Stoics, for instance, used the argument that we love people to whom we do good more than we love those who do good to us to oppose generous self-love to both selfishness and altruism. To them, actual love of self was in fact the natural reward of virtue and, as such, the core principle of friendship and active participation in the common good. This interpretation of self-love was, however, largely opposed by Christian theology. Saint Augustine described original sin as the corruption of man’s love of God into self-love. Since pagan virtues derive from self-love, they are sinful and false. Outside of Christian charity all human virtues are but disguised vices.

Paradoxically, in a context when this quarrel over the falsehood of human virtues outside of charity was revived at the Renaissance, an austere Augustinian interpretation of human self-love played a significant role in the invention of modern economic science: if only God’s grace can remedy the evil nature of self-love, skillful government should not foolishly attempt to make men virtuous but should instead channel their vices for the greater benefit of society. Such reflections directly influenced Bernard Mandeville, whose famous motto “Private vices. Public benefits” inspired Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand”. Allegedly, the greed and selfishness of the rich may result in creating more wealth, and more distribution of this wealth to the poor through labor, than charity will ever have been able to. Indeed, from Rousseau to Smith, philosophers challenged Mandeville’s controversial argument pointing to its restrictive understanding of self-love and its negative moral and political consequences.

This course will examine these philosophical debates on self-love and the common good in Antiquity, their impact in Early Modern French and European thought, as well as their role in the genealogy of political economy in the early wake of capitalism.