ISF 10 Enduring Questions and Great Books in the Western Tradition
- day and time MW 12-2PM
- location Cory 241
- instructor BHANDARI
- 4 Units
- Class # 23231
The focus will be on two thinkers: Plato and Galileo. Two watersheds in the history of Western thought were the introduction of the logic of the concept and the practice of experimentation. In The Republic Plato introduced us to analysis of our everyday concepts to show how unstable, vague, poorly understood and arbitrarily applied they are. Thinking had to turn on the concepts through which we ordinarily think, and Plato gave us our still greatest dialectical example of this in his dialogues on the meaning of justice in The Republic. Galileo introduced into human thought the redefinition of knowledge grounded in observation and experiment and expressed in the abstraction of mathematical symbols. These are two of the greatest turning points in human thought, and we will focus on Plato’s and Galileo‘s writings, while also consulting Jonny Thakkar’s and Mario Livio’s recent commentary on them, respectively.