LARTS 324 — Plato’s Republic

3 credits
Spring
Aaron Jaffe

This class will engage in a careful reading of Plato’s classical work The Republic. We will unpack the drama of the text as we chart the development of Plato’s ideal city, paying particularly close attention to questions of justice, the value of morality, how we acquire knowledge, censorship of the arts, the function of political utopias, and the role of beauty more generally. The class will require regular reading, preparation for in-class discussion, presentations, a midterm, and a final research paper due at the end of the semester.