via University of Chicago
HUMA 12300-12400-12500. Human Being and Citizen I-II-III.
"Human Being and Citizen explores the needs and aspirations that draw human beings together in formal and informal communities and the problems that we encounter as social animals in the pursuit of human flourishing. We investigate matters of justice, the law, and leadership, and consider these together with modes of human interaction from contractual relations to friendship and kinship ties in both their legislative and affective dimensions (especially love, anger, shame, grief, and faith). We think about the role of divinity (from Greek mythology to modern Christianity) in shaping the ways our texts conceive of these topics, and we consider ideas about the formation of the self."
Sample texts: "Our readings are predominantly drawn from the western tradition—Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Kant, among others—and these canonical texts do not go unquestioned."
HUMA 12300. Human Being and Citizen I. 100 Units.
Explores "the ways that ancient literary, philosophical, and religious texts (from the Greek, Mesopotamian, and Abrahamic traditions) conceive of, express ideals about, and articulate tensions in conceptions of human and divine law and justice, affective life, human striving, and the human being as such."
Sample texts: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad, the book of Genesis, dialogues of Plato, and Sophocles' Antigone.
HUMA 12400. Human Being and Citizen II.
Examines "conceptions of the human good in connection with practices of the self as they pertain to virtue, the social order, spiritual beliefs and practices, and community. We ask what constitutes human flourishing and explore relations and tensions between individual self-formation and the social and political good."
Texts: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine's Confessions, and Dante's Inferno.
HUMA 12500. Human Being and Citizen III.
Examines "matters of community, law, freedom, morality, and ideology in a (broadly speaking) modern idiom of citizenship, with its attendant idea of the human being as a rights-bearing subject. We ask what (whether culture, religion, reason itself) might ground our moral judgments, and what the limits and freedoms are of thinking the human being as a subject accorded rights through instruments of philosophical or political law. Resourced by our autumn and winter texts, we consider the impact of thinking about race, ethnicity, and gender through a modern lens and how these considerations both challenge and draw on the past."
Sample texts: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and Baldwin's No Name in the Street.