University of Stirling

Philosophy

Current Students: Undergraduates

 

PHI913 - From Plato to Existentialism

This course offers a philosophical examination of several challenging and influential theoretical discussions of the relation between the individual and society.   The course begins with two dialogues, The Apology of Socrates and Crito, in which Plato’s Socrates, facing imminent execution on a charge of corrupting the young, expounds his conception of what it is to live well. The Socratic vision of the good life contrasts vividly with the vision of life in the state of nature offered by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan. For Hobbes an individual’s life without civil society would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. A government with absolute authority is required to save people from themselves. The question of the relation between the individual and the state is pursued very differently in John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty. Mill places definite limits on the power of the state over the individual. State interference in the life of individuals is only legitimate in order to present harm to others. The tensions between individual and society are at their starkest in the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism is a polemical presentation of the existential challenge confronting the individual in a world where individual choice is the only source of value.

Outcomes

  • To introduce students to a range of important texts in the history of philosophy and Western thought.
  • To equip students with an understanding of how to read and study historical texts.
  • To help students think critically about the set texts and to communicate their thoughts clearly and accurately in writing and in group discussion.

Background Reading

  • H. Treddenick (Ed.), The Last Days of Socrates (London. Penguin). (You are advised to purchase this, but there are good on-line editions of both The Apology and the Crito.)
  • Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford World Classics), edited with introduction by J.C.A. Gaskin
  • J.S. Mill, On Liberty (Penguin paperback).
  • J.-P. Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. by Philip Mairet (Methuen paperback). 

 

 
Prerequisites:

PHI911 (Philosophy: What is it all about?) and/or PHI912 (Metaphysics and Morality)
Assessment :

50 percent-First essay

50 percent-Final two-hour examination

Students may choose to submit a second essay to improve their coursework grade.

Teaching Pattern :
Two one-hour lectures and one one-hour seminar each week
Regulations:
Seminars on this module are prescribed. Attendance, coursework, and exam regulations are laid out in the Philosophy Student Handbook, section F.

 

 

Please contact Simon Hope if you would like to know more about this module.