AY Core Courses 2009/10
AY - Autumn Term
The Republic and Its Interlocutors
The focus of this class is Plato's Republic-or, in Greek, Politeia: "Regime" or "Civil Society"-also the word Aristotle (Plato's student) uses in the Politics to designate the good kind of democracy. The Republic depicts and draws us into a conversation about the kinds of values (ethical, political, aesthetic, religious, epistemic, and literary) at the heart of ECLA's approach to education, and at the heart of human life simply. It engages with these values in the form of a single conversation, rather than separating them out into the subjects of several treatises-which might in turn be separated out into the curricula of several academic departments. Although the Republic may be said to contain a "social contract" theory, a theory of psychology, a theology, a critique of mimetic art, a theory of education, and a taxonomy of political regimes, it is reducible to none of these, and the list itself is not exhaustive.
It is an unusual feature of this class that we read and discuss other texts in-between sections of the Republic. Just as Socrates appears in conversation with his interlocutors, the Republic itself seems to be in conversation with other authors, works, and kinds of thought in the Greek tradition. Reading Homer's Iliad, Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony, poems of Sappho, Aristophanes' Clouds, and Sophocles' Antigone, we seek to better appreciate and evaluate the arguments and the actions taking place in the Republic, and to develop our capacities to be informed interlocutors for Plato and for each other. We conclude with Plato's Phaedrus in order to compare its treatments of Eros, the nature of the soul, moderation, and reason with those of the Republic. We also expect the reflections on the art of writing at the end of the Phaedrus to help us better understand Plato's dialogues simply.
In terms of educational philosophy, the starting point for this class is the belief that the most rewarding way to study the Republic or another Platonic dialogue is to read it closely in its entirety in a spirit of serious and open inquiry. We do not take the point of view that because we are born later than Plato we are automatically wiser. In positive terms, we stress the dialogic character of Plato's writing: that his Socrates appears in a specific dramatic context, talking to specific characters with specific concerns, hopes, and fears. At least some of these hopes and fears may be ours as well. For example, the hope that justice or morality is somehow its own reward, that it is good for the person who is just-and the corresponding fear that by being just we help others but not ourselves and miss out on the things that are truly good in life; or, we may fear that by being just or moral we would be living our lives according to what one particular society, the society in which we happened to be raised, only thought was just or moral.
AY Core Syllabus Autumn 2009/2010
AY - Winter Term
Forms of Love
It is undeniable that love has been and still is a distinctive and fundamental value in Western cultural tradition (amongst others) - a value whose meaning has undergone numerous changes throughout different historical moments, but which has constantly defined interpersonal relationships and social, as well as political, behaviour in Western culture. Indeed, we can say that specific definitions of love are both the products and the producers of different conceptualizations of human nature, of gender identity and of social and political systems.
This course focuses on classical antiquity, early Christian and medieval traditions. In these periods the experience of love was privileged as one of the highest forms of interpersonal relationship and as a way of understanding the relation between human beings and the divine. Accordingly, this experience has been the subject of many different philosophical, theological and psychological discourses which attempted to understand a phenomenon which, by its very nature, seems to exceed conceptualization. In this course we will investigate these traditional discussions on the theme of love in order to develop a conceptual vocabulary and a framework for our own questioning. Although the texts in the course are presented as far as possible in chronological order, the historical development of the concept of love is not the ultimate focus of the course, but, rather, a background on the basis of which we may be able to critically question and investigate this topic, also in the light of its meaning and significance in contemporary society. To this purpose the course is further supported by a variety of Thursday special seminars where we often depart from the specific historical context and adopt a more theoretical and contemporary perspective on each week's themes.
Throughout the term we will consider the interrelationship among forms of love, as expressed in a range of literary and religious texts. The progression of the course will be primarily driven by this interrelationship, specifically through the sequence and juxtaposition of texts we read. Plato's Symposium, with its various speeches in praise of love, opens up a range of perspectives on, and interpretations of, love that are relevant to many of the other texts we read later in the term. Following Plato, the focus in weeks two to four is on Christian texts, works that introduce something apparently absent in the Symposium: love as agape ("the fatherly love of God for man, as well as man's reciprocal love for God" and, by extension, the love of one's fellow human beings). Furthermore, in reading parts of the New Testament, Augustine's Confessions, and other religious texts, we will examine the relationship between this new ideal of agape and a Christian notion of eros as a yearning for God. From week seven onwards, we will read literary texts whose form and language were deeply innovative; in this part of the course our investigation will also involve the analysis of the way in which specific concepts of love give shape to different literary forms, and, in turn, we will reflect on how the literary tradition which these texts have produced propagated and, so to say, 'naturalized' ideals of love and of the individual, which we may recognize also from our contemporary perspective.
In weeks six and seven, dedicated to lyric poetry, we address first the mystical tradition, in which the yearning for the divine coexists, in poetic expression, with physical, earthly desire, and then the medieval tradition of secular love poetry and song. In certain ways almost indistinguishable from mystical religious poems, these secular songs also embody another ideal of love, one grounded in the interpersonal and the individual, the courtly love of the troubadours. In week eight, we consider texts in which this courtly ideal finds narrative expression, and sexual love finds affirmation in quasi-religious terms. In the final weeks of the course, we look at Dante's Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy, and at the way he brings many of the strands running throughout the course together - plenitude and yearning, the sensual and the spiritual, the individual and the universal, the earthly/physical and the divine - in texts oriented around the transformative power of love.
AY Core Syllabus Winter 2009/2010
AY - Spring Term
Values of Renaissance Florence
This Academy Year / BA core course prepares an intensive on-site engagement with late medieval and Renaissance Florentine art and culture by fostering fundamental dialogue about art and its relationship to history, ethics, and politics. It is hardly possible to encounter the organic growth of Florentine painting from the 12th to the 16th centuries without asking general questions about style and style change, realism and artistic representation, or indeed about the social and religious roots of art itself. More broadly, this dialogue about art raises fundamental questions such as: How do we value art, and what characterizes the values that are specific to art? What kinds of demands and claims does art make on us? Does it make demands at all, or are we as human beings free to engage with art on any terms we like, or even to live a life without any real contact with or need for art? Is the reception of art always historically conditioned? If so, can we improve -does our response as viewers become richer and more meaningful - can we more fully enjoy art - when we become better historians? Is there value-free reasoning about art, or is thinking about art irreducibly aesthetic, and thus thoroughly embedded in aesthetic values, however defined? Are the creation of and response to works of art ipso facto ways of knowing? Can art mediate between political and personal virtue?
While these questions are important in and of themselves, they are also the types of questions taken up by the art historical study of the period. But we may also speculate as to how problems of this kind informed the actual production of particular works. And our visits to the places where these works continue to be located often from the time they were commissioned will also prove poignant tests of their explanatory value and potential as aids to understanding. It is no accident that the Florentine context provides an ideal locus for thinking about these questions. Florence is generally considered 'the cradle of the Renaissance' and in many ways the Renaissance creates and defines the terms that shape thinking about art in the modern Western tradition. It is in this period that art emerges as an autonomous form of value in the manner that we continue to understand it today. The more specific values embodied in this general move toward independence are largely our present ones in the sense that we relate to them as such whether we individually accept them or not. We value style, and it is in this period that artworks are conceived of as creations of individual artists with a particular style. In and through art nature (and the scientific view of nature), the social world, human emotions, and lived experience are being discovered as sources of value in and of themselves. Many of these concerns find expression already in the works of Dante and Boccaccio, in ways that parallel and interact with their emergence in the visual arts. The art of the period is also philosophical in the sense that relying on the normative force of its medium it sets the terms for the discourse of the ideals it embodies. Art argues its case by the spell it casts over us, by the aesthetic mechanisms it relies on to direct our engagement with it. The forms of attention art commands make up its mode of normativity. Our attitude towards it, our acceptance or rejection of it is the work's mode of asserting and assessing the validity of the values that it engenders. The art that we see come into being in Florence, its several transformations, 'flourishing' and 'decline' (as the Renaissance would understand it), speaks to us in the language of ideals that have shaped our identities.
Yet, at the same time, because of its historical distance, our relationship to Renaissance visual art calls into question this very mode of relating to art: the aesthetic mode. Precisely because so many of the categories operative in the art of the Renaissance are recognizable as close to our own (cf. Alberti's ideas about the conditions of artistic creation, about composition, subject matter, and the status of the artist) we ask whether they are really the same. For instance, is our notion of style applicable to the way Renaissance artists defined individuality in execution, or to the terms in which a patron sought out the skills of a particular painter? Can we recapture the 'perceptual set' (Baxandall) characteristic of the period or the context informing the notions of 'skill' that set the basis of what we call critical evaluation? When, if ever, is it legitimate to call a Renaissance work of art 'expressive' in our sense of that word? Are the values we recognize as embodied in a Renaissance portrait really the same as the values of the sitter, the artist, or the audience for whom it was intended? There are classes of objects, such as altarpieces or even privately commissioned secular works, where the loss of relivable context arguably implies the loss of recoverable meaning. Can we at all fully understand what the Renaissance means by nature as an ideal? We relate to the works as aesthetic objects but is it really the works that we relate to or rather our own perceptions, interpretations and uses of them? Can we develop a sense of the meaning(s) of works of art based upon our own sensibilities when the reconstruction of the historical sensibility and 'intention' that went into their creation runs into so much difficulty? Is it at all legitimate to recognize these works as works of art in our sense of that value term, or are these simply historical objects endowed with certain powers of representation and symbolization, fulfilling certain functions determined by the historical context? Might it be that we simply enjoy these works for the sense of history they embody and precisely for the romance of their distance from us?
To aid the overview of a vast body of material, the course is organized chronologically around three phases of Florentine culture relying on traditional periodization. We begin with the communal age (the emergence of the medieval town as an independent political entity) and its major literary achievements (Dante, Boccaccio). For the Quattrocento (i.e. the fifteenth century) our focus will be on the development of the visual arts and the Renaissance theory of art, as well as an associated aesthetic sensibility as perceived by later writers reflecting back on the Renaissance, in particular Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and Walter Pater (1839-1894). The final section of the course will consider the period of the crumbling of the city-republic signalling the end of the concentration of important historical and artistic trends in the city of Florence. Modern political philosophy emerges in concrete reflection on this process of decline (Machiavelli). Cinquecento art - most notably that of Michelangelo, as well as the Mannerists (including Vasari) - in many ways defines itself against the Florentine past even as it grows from it, via the High Renaissance and its synthesis and transformation of trends within late Quattrocento Florentine art. The chronological organization of the course, alongside analyses of various phases of Florentine history made available in the course reader, will allow students to address questions of historical development, context, and interpretation moving beyond reflection on primary sources. Occasionally, we may read a text rooted in a different geographical area when it functions to introduce the main aspects of Florentine culture at a time when that culture had become established in Rome and had expanded to embrace central Italy as a whole.
With the trip to Florence in the first week of the term, the structure of the course as well as the individual weeks are designed with an eye to building upon this initial encounter with the cultural and historical presence of the city itself. Visual images will feature in all seminar discussions, and every week will cover some significant aspect or phase of the development of the arts in Florence, as well as of the urban environment. Students will be individually assigned significant works of art or architecture for study. Faculty will lead tours for groups of students in Florence, during which students will also participate as guides by introducing the works of art that they will then be working on over the course of the term.