Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.

Course Description

Legend has it that over the gate to Plato's Academy were the words "Let no one enter who has not studied geometry." Western philosophy and theoretical mathematics were born together, and the cross-fertilization of ideas in the two disciplines was continuously acknowledged throughout antiquity. In this course we will read works of ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics, and investigate the way in which ideas of definition, reason, argument and proof, rationality and irrationality, number, quality and quantity, truth, and even the idea of an idea were shaped by the interplay of philosophic and mathematical inquiry. We will examine how the discovery of the incommensurability of magnitudes upset the Pythagorean faith that 'everything is number', and how early philosophy responded to this challenge to the Greek presumption that the kosmos is fundamentally understandable. Finally, we investigate Greek attempts to circumvent the resistance of human ethics to precise (i.e. quantitative) expression.

Assignments

There is a substantial amount of reading for this course. Each week you will turn in a one page response to one or two study questions. From writing these you will start to formulate a topic for your final paper. About half-way through the semester I will ask you to submit some provisional paper topics for that paper. Then, about one week before the paper is due, you will submit a draft, so that you can get feedback to make your paper wonderful. The paper will be at least 10 pages in length.

Each student will be expected to do one oral presentation during the semester. The oral presentation will concern the reading of that week, and will be either a response to one of the study questions for that week or on a subject cleared with me. Regular participation in class discussion is expected. If it is difficult for you to speak up in class, I advise you to talk to the class teaching assistant and me from time to time about the course content.

Grading