Love and Friendship

We will start with Plato's Phaedrus, to learn about love (eros) and its relationship to speaking and writing, followed by Plato’s Symposium, also on love. Next, we read Aristotle's Ethics to consider friendship in relation to politics and philosophy. Then we will read: a Shakespeare Sonnet; Montaigne's essay, "Of Friendship"; Bacon’s essay “Of Friendship,”; Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It; Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We will also study parts of The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, by Sister Miriam Joseph. 3 hrs. sem.