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Tentative Curriculum for PHIL 24-25 Academic Year

¹ 297A Seminar:  The Normativity of Nature

The seminar explores the origins and developments of an assumption present in virtually every current of Ancient Greek Philosophy, namely that the natural state of things is the good state of things.  This assumption entails that nature as such is the source of norms - cosmological, metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, aesthetic.  We shall examine texts belonging to different philosophers and periods and spanning from the so-called era of the Presocratic philosophers to the Sophists, Socrates and the Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers of the Hellenistic period (Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics).  We shall proceed with a broad notion of normativity and a broad conception of nature (physis), seeking how or whether evaluative or strictly normative elements may be involved in this latter.  The work that we shall do is primarily historical and follows a roughly linear path.  It will be of interest to historians of philosophy as well as those specialising in core areas, including metaethics, in so far as it highlights from new angles essential features and presuppositions of morality.