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Socrates famously claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates and other ancient thinkers examined themselves and found that they did not match up to their own ideals. They thus set out to transform themselves to achieve a good and happy life. What is the good life? How do we change ourselves to live a good and happy life? How do literature and philosophy help us to understand ourselves and to achieve our social, ethical, and personal ideals? In this class, we examine Socrates and Augustine's lives and ideas. Each struggled to live a good and happy life. In each case, they urge us to transform ourselves into better human beings. The first half of the course focuses on the Athenian Socrates, who was put to death because he rejected traditional Greek ideals and and proclaimed a new kind of ethical goodness. The second half focuses on the North African Augustine, an unhappy soul who became a new man by converting to Christianity. These thinkers addressed questions and problems that we still confront today: What do we consider to be a happy life? Do we need to be good and ethical people to live happily? Is there one correct set of values? How do we accommodate other people's beliefs? Is it possible to experience a transformation of the self? How exactly do we change ourselves to achieve our higher ideals?nFriday lectures will be held 9:30am-10:50am in Bishop Auditorium.

Socrates famously claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living.  Socrates and other ancient thinkers examined themselves and found that they did not match up to their own ideals.  They thus set out to transform themselves to achieve a good and happy life.  What is the good life?  How do we change ourselves to live a good and happy life?  How do literature and philosophy help us to understand ourselves and to achieve our social, ethical, and personal ideals? In this class, we examine Socrates and Augustine's lives and ideas.  Each struggled to live a good and happy life.  In each case, they urge us to transform ourselves into better human beings.  The first half of the course focuses on the Athenian Socrates, who was put to death because he rejected traditional Greek ideals and and proclaimed a new kind of ethical goodness.  The second half focuses on the North African Augustine, an unhappy soul who became a new man by converting to Christianity.  These thinkers addressed questions and problems that we still confront today:  What do we consider to be a happy life?  Do we need to be good and ethical people to live happily?  Is there one correct set of values?  How do we accommodate other people's beliefs?  Is it possible to experience a transformation of the self?  How exactly do we change ourselves to achieve our higher ideals?

The Challenge of Choice addresses these questions by engaging key texts from the liberal arts tradition that explore decisions and their consequences, exposing the multi-faceted nature of choice. By representing characters with whom we sympathize, as well as those whose experience seems worlds away from our own, artists (novelists, playwrights, filmmakers) ask us to consider the web of circumstance that influences a character to choose one course over another. Distance from our own subjectivity the stories are not ours, but they could be allows these works to shed light on the dilemmas that face us as we go about `choosing the life we think we would like to live. Confronting these works, we find that the kinds of choices we make grow in depth, magnitude, and significance.

The Challenge of Choice addresses these questions by engaging key texts from the liberal arts tradition that explore decisions and their consequences, exposing the multi-faceted nature of choice. By representing characters with whom we sympathize, as well as those whose experience seems worlds away from our own, artists (novelists, playwrights, filmmakers) ask us to consider the web of circumstance that influences a character to choose one course over another. Distance from our own subjectivity the stories are not ours, but they could be allows these works to shed light on the dilemmas that face us as we go about `choosing the life we think we would like to live. Confronting these works, we find that the kinds of choices we make grow in depth, magnitude, and significance.

What does it mean to serve your country? All ethical systems train the individual to relinquish self-interest in favor of a larger communal good. When you applied to Stanford, you answered many application questions designed to elicit evidence of your ability to serve others, which is considered a sign of good character, leadership, and ability to thrive beyond the confines of your family and private world. Knowing you've wrestled with this question at length, showing sacrifice, endurance, empathy, and understanding of higher goods, this course asks you to examine the nation's view. How can the nation present itself as worthy of your personal sacrifice? Do you need to believe in the greatness of your nation to serve? What kind of cause demands your devotion? Nations have differently articulated such a commitment. Some make modest demands and promise you your own sovereignty. Others request only that you dream of national greatness as your own and that you lend a hand. But all nations require at some point, everything from you. What and when are you prepared to give? This course begins with the shortest and most powerful demand for the last full measure your devotion. President Abraham Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address', which presents the ideals of the American nation as worthy of returning to war. Following this question of devotion to your nation, the course moves to President JF Kennedy's 'What can you do for your nation' speech, and then to diverse periods and perspectives around the globe.

What does it mean to serve your country? All ethical systems train the individual to relinquish self-interest in favor of a larger communal good. When you applied to Stanford, you answered many application questions designed to elicit evidence of your ability to serve others, which is considered a sign of good character, leadership, and ability to thrive beyond the confines of your family and private world. Knowing you've wrestled with this question at length, showing sacrifice, endurance, empathy, and understanding of higher goods, this course asks you to examine the nation's view. How can the nation present itself as worthy of your personal sacrifice? Do you need to believe in the greatness of your nation to serve? What kind of cause demands your devotion? Nations have differently articulated such a commitment. Some make modest demands and promise you your own sovereignty. Others request only that you dream of national greatness as your own and that you lend a hand. But all nations require at some point, everything from you. What and when are you prepared to give? This course begins with the shortest and most powerful demand for the last full measure your devotion. President Abraham Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address', which presents the ideals of the American nation as worthy of returning to war. Following this question of devotion to your nation, the course moves to President JF Kennedy's 'What can you do for your nation' speech, and then to diverse periods and perspectives around the globe.

How do we make sense of the colonial foundations of the modern world? What is it to decolonize our institutions, minds and politics? In recent years, the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa has spurred on a vibrant and difficult discussion across the world, about the legacy of colonialism in the modern university. Students and academics have been engaged in devising methods to understand and undo this colonial inheritance and confront the various connected structures of power such as hetero-patriarchy, racism, and class. One aspect of this endeavor has been to delve deep into the intellectual resources developed by anti-colonial and decolonial writers, revolutionaries, academics, and activists from the postcolonial world. This course is designed as a deep engagement with this critical decolonial work by some of the most significant thinkers from the Global South in the last hundred years. We will begin the course by developing a basic understanding of the contemporary call for decolonizing the university and the field of postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. After this, the main focus of this course will be a close reading and reflection on the writings that today constitute a rich reservoir of ideas for contemporary struggles to decolonize, to think critically about structures of power and injustice and to search for languages of liberation.

How do we make sense of the colonial foundations of the modern world? What is it to decolonize our institutions, minds and politics? In recent years, the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa has spurred on a vibrant and difficult discussion across the world, about the legacy of colonialism in the modern university. Students and academics have been engaged in devising methods to understand and undo this colonial inheritance and confront the various connected structures of power such as hetero-patriarchy, racism, and class. One aspect of this endeavor has been to delve deep into the intellectual resources developed by anti-colonial and decolonial writers, revolutionaries, academics, and activists from the postcolonial world. This course is designed as a deep engagement with this critical decolonial work by some of the most significant thinkers from the Global South in the last hundred years. We will begin the course by developing a basic understanding of the contemporary call for decolonizing the university and the field of postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. After this, the main focus of this course will be a close reading and reflection on the writings that today constitute a rich reservoir of ideas for contemporary struggles to decolonize, to think critically about structures of power and injustice and to search for languages of liberation.

The class will approach the travel writings of early modern scientists who used exposure to the tropics to establish the foundations of evolutionary biology. These first generations of scientists both had to learn from each other and make it up as they went along. Humboldt's travels from 1799-1804 were an inspiration for Darwin's travels in the 1830s. Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle inspired Wallace and Bates to go to the Amazon a generation later. None of them were far removed from being students themselves: Darwin, Wallace, and Bates were all in their early 20s when starting out and Humboldt was an old man of 29. Their writings capture the excitement of their youth, their scientific idealism, and the breadth and depth of their interest in the natural world. We can explore the history of the science and the modern updating of that science. There is also taking advantage of being exposed to new horizons, the importance of a rigorous curiosity in life, the recognition of unique opportunity. A newly emerging framework of geologic time allowed understanding of evolutionary processes but only in conjunction with the possibility of global travel and experience of both temperate and tropical biotas-travel dependent on the colonial infrastructure built up by Spain and Portugal over the previous centuries and unraveling in the early 1800s. The travel writings capture young scientists working out the founding of their own scientific disciplines and the sacrifices and dedication that required, all in the context of a time when unique new connections could first have been made. The writings of these young scientists also capture the costs, both environmental and human, underlying their educational opportunities. We will have a chance to consider the blind spots among those that considered themselves unbiased scientific observers, the unintended consequences, and their roles and culpabilities within the colonial systems that made their work possible. The infrastructural capacity to observe tropical forests unavoidably also meant the degradation of those environments. Loss can be seen over the course of individual travel books and has only accelerated since one of Wallace's most remote locales is now an amusement water park, complete with YouTube videos.