This course is an interdisciplinary series of connected lectures delivered by eminent scholars from several colleges and universities. Each professor addresses an area of personal expertise and focuses not only on the matter at hand, but on the larger story-on the links between the works and the figures discussed. The lectures address-in chronological sequence-a series of major works that have shaped the ongoing development of Western thought both in their own right and in cultural dialogue with other traditions. In the process, the course engages many of the most perennial and far-reaching questions that we face in our daily lives.The lectures draw upon the resources of history, philosophy, literary study, art history, religious studies, political science, and the history of science and technology, in hopes of engaging the rich and profoundly interactive discussions that, over the course of forty centuries, have made Western culture what it is.
Lecture 1 Thucydides's The Peloponnesian War
Lecture 2 The Rise and Fall of Athens, Early Greek Philosophy, Xenophon
Lecture 3 Plato's Euthyphro
Lecture 4 Plato's Theaetetus
Lecture 5 Plato's Theory of Forms
Lecture 6 Aristotle's Philosophic System
Lecture 7 Aristotle's Ethics
Lecture 8 Alexander of Macedon and the Graeco-Roman World
Lecture 9 Virgil's Aeneid
Lecture 10 Ovid's Metamorphoses
Lecture 11 Roman Art and Engineering
Lecture 12 Plotinus and Neoplatonism
Lecture 13 The Christian Bible: The Gospels
Lecture 14 The Christian Bible: Acts and Epistles of St. Paul