Prosoché/προσοχή

 Michel de Certeau, “The Unnameable” in The Practice of Everyday Life

Pierre Hadot and Ivan Illich on Life -- con-spiratio -- and Joy

Hadot, “The Present Alone is Our Happiness”

 “The Present Alone is Our Joy: The Meaning of the Present Instant in Goethe and Ancient Philosophy”

Illich, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy” in The Challenges of Ivan Illich

Archived lecture, recorded in Winchester, 'On Ivan Illich, 'The Cultivation of Conspiracy,' ca. April 2021

Recommended: 

Illich, “To Hell with Good Intentions”

Sharpe, “‘To Not Forget’: Hadot’s Last Book on Goethe”

Powers of Imagining

Reading:

Antonio de Nicolás, “The Native, General Background of Ignatius of Loyola”

Chapter One: de Nicolás, Powers of Imagining: A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining through the Collected Works of Ignatius de Loyola

    PDF here or Read online at the Internet archive here 

Foreword by Patrick Aidan Heelan, S.J

Background Reading: 

Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises also in de Nicolás, Powers of Imagining

Recommended: 

de Nicolás, “Imagining”; “A Text for Reading, A Text for Deciding” (in Powers of Imagining)

Illich, “Scholastic Reading” (in In the Vineyard of the Text)

Asceticism and the Care of the Self: Self-Control and Self-Expression

Reading

Foucault, “The Body” (in: The Care of the Self)

Background: 

Plato, Phaedrus; Foucault, The Use of Pleasure

Recommended: 

Hadot, “Reflections on the Idea of the Cultivation of the Self” (in Philosophy as a Way of Life) 

Flynn, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Foucault and Hadot” 

Miller, “The Art of Self-Fashioning”

Tales of Death and ‘Junior Devils’

Readings

Lucian, The Downward Journey

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Background

Goethe, Faust

Recommended 

Smith, “Account of the Death of David Hume, Esq.” 

Babich, “Signatures and Taste”

Mancini, “Twelve Things You Might Not Know”

Zipes, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Harry Potter, and Why Magic Matters” 

In the Vineyard of the Text

Reading

Illich, “Reading Toward Wisdom” (In the Vineyard of the Text) 

Background: 

Hugh of Saint Victor, Didascalicon

Recommended: 

Stock, “The Self in Literary Experience” 

de Certeau, “The Scriptural Economy” (The Practice of Everyday Life) 

Interview with Gros, “Why Going for a Walk is the Best Way to Free Your Mind”

Babich, “Nietzsche’s Spiritual Exercises” 

Illich, “Order, Memory, and History” (In the Vineyard of the Text) (excerpts)

Epicurus

Reading:

Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus”

Epicurus, “Principle Doctrines”  [pdf]

Recommended: 

Hadot, “The View from Above”

Babich, “Epicurean Gardens and Nietzsche’s White Seas”

Mitsis, “Epicurus on Death and the Duration of Life”

Method and Perfection: Towards Happiness

Epictetus/Arrian, Encheiridion/Handbook

Recommended: 

Hadot, “The Stoicism of Epictetus” in: The Inner Citadel

Hadot, “The Philosopher-Slave and the Emperor-Philosopher” in: The Inner Citadel

de Lacy, “The Logical Structure of the Ethics of Epictetus”

Marcus Aurelius: To Himself

Hadot, “Philosophy, Exegesis, and Creative Mistakes” (in: Philosophy as a Way of Life)

Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises” (also in: Philosophy as a Way of Life)

    Supplemental readings

    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Recommended

Hadot, “A First Glimpse of the Meditations” (in: The Inner Citadel) 

Hadot, “Marcus Aurelius” (in: Philosophy as a Way of Life) 

Sherefkin, “Philosophy as a Way of Life”

 Reading: Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet

Background: Plato, Symposium; Phaedrus; Republic, Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 

Supplemental: Selections from Sappho, Archilochus, Anacreon in West, trans. Greek Lyric

Recommended: 

Greene, “Sappho, Foucault, and Women’s Erotics”

Burrows, “Raiding the Inarticulate”

Morris, “Un-forgetting Asclepius”

On the Brevity of Life

 Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Link

Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae

Self-Cultivation: Human Excellence

Hadot, “Forms of Life, Forms of Discourse” in Philosophy as a Way of Life

Background or supplemental reading: Augustine, Confessions

           Ong, Method and the Decay of Dialogue 

 

Recommended: 

Hadot, “A First Glimpse of the Meditations” (The Inner Citadel)

Illich, “Order, Memory, and History” (In the Vineyard of the Text)

Love and the Soul

Plato, Phaedrus

Recommended: 

Pender, “Sappho and Anacreon in Plato’s Phaedrus”

Lebeck, “The Central Myth of Plato’s Phaedrus”

Güven, “Death and Madness in the Phaedo and Phaedrus”

Giasoumis, “Self-Knowledge, Eros and Recollection in Plato’s Phaedrus”

Finbloom, “Plato’s Phaedrus: A Memory Pharmacy”

Plato, Myth of Er  in Republic, Book X

Krause, “Plato’s Myth of Er”

Thayer, “The Myth of Er” 

Bussanich, “Rebirth Eschatology in Plato and Plotinus”

Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful

Babich, “Gadamer, Beauty, and Musical Improvisation”

Before Philosophy: Orphic and Dionysian Mysteries

Graf and Johnston, “Ritual Texts for the Afterlife”

Radcliffe-Edmonds “The Bright Cypress of the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets”

Bernabé and San Cristobal, “Arrival in the Subterranean World” in Instructions for the Netherworld

Bernabé, “What is a Katábasis?”

Adluri, ed., Philosophy and Salvation in Greek Religion

Godwin, “Orphic Mysteries”

Burkert, “How to Learn About Souls”

Plato, Myth of Er, in Republic, Book X

 

Classical Values: Philosophy as a Way of Life Fall 2024