Learning Outcomes
(a) To enable students to understand and appreciate the importance of the ancient Greek philosophical thinking.
(b) To acquaint students with the development of the philosophical thought in antiquity, highlighting the stages, the representatives, the central philosophical questions as well as the several branches of ancient Greek philosophy.
(c)To exercise students in reading and comprehending ancient Greek philosophical texts from the original, and to encourage them to engage themselves with philosophical thinking, starting from their responses to the texts they study.
Course Content (Syllabus)
The class offers a concise introduction to ancient Greek philosophy and its main representatives. The introduction focuses on the development of philosophy in antiquity, with due emphasis given to the genesis, the periods, the central questions asked by philosophers, the principles and methods of philosophy. The overview of the history of philosophy in antiquity is complemented by the detailed study of a representative philosophical work from the original. This study, apart from focusing on the language of the text, goes on to bring to the fore, on an interpretive level, the philosophical themes posed by the writer, the relation of the specific treatment to other treatments of similar issues in other texts, the methodology employed as well as the aims of the work.