ENROLL

Claire M Griffin

How should we live? This is the fundamental question for the study of ethics. This course looks at classic and contemporary answers to the fundamental question from Socrates to Kant to modern day thinkers. Along the way, we consider slightly (but only slightly) more tractable questions such as: What reason is there to be moral? Is there such a thing as moral knowledge (and if so, how do we get it)? What are the fundamental principles of right and wrong (if there are any at all)? Is morality objective?

Claire M Griffin

Who am I? What kind of world do I live in? What kind of life is possible or desirable for me? While these questions have been part of philosophy since its inception, there may be particular epistemic and ethical dilemmas of knowing ourselves as modern and post-modern subjects. Both theoretical and practical challenges to self-knowledge have emerged in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Psychoanalysis, sociology, and evolutionary science have made us question whether there is an essential self to be known and, if so, whether we could have access to it. Historical events, including the world wars and the increased industrialization, bureaucratization, and secularization of western societies have made reckoning with finitude and alienation central to any project of self-knowledge. In this course we will consider the challenges to self-knowledge posed by life in the modern world, and ‘authenticity’ and ‘irony’ as two prominent responses to this fundamental self-estrangement.