Objectives
What are the definitions of education, truth, liberty, citizenship, justice, nationhood? And how do we arrive at these definitions? Through close reading, analysis and discussion of key texts in moral and political philosophy, doctoral researchers in this seminar will address these questions.
In the first term, reading will be drawn from works by Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Christine de Pizan, Niccolò Machiavelli, René Descartes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the second term, reading will be drawn from works by Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edvard Westermarck, Hannah Arendt, and Rachel Carson. In addition to writing regular short essays, students will take turns delivering oral reports on segments of the reading. Central to this seminar is candid conversation about these texts, their relationship to each other, and their significance today.
Inspired by the seminar in moral and political philosophy at Columbia University, initiated in 1919 and mandatory since for all students, this seminar will be co-taught by a veteran professor from that program, Samuel Abrams, along with Rauno Huttunen. To build on this connection, occasional Zoom sessions will be scheduled with Columbia students and professors reading the same texts.
- Opettaja
Rauno Huttunen