Class: Classics 095: Happiness and Pleasure
Room and Times: MWF 9:35-10:25 Waterman 455
Professor: Jacques Bailly
jacques.bailly@uvm.edu
656-0993
office hours: Monday 10:35-11:35 Thursday, 11:20-12:20, and by appointment

Happiness and Pleasure

What is the point of life? In Ancient Greece, the answer was clear: happiness. Even if you agree, you might ask, "What is happiness?" or "How do I get it?" While happiness and how to measure it is a hot issue in modern economics and other social sciences (which will be ever so briefly explored in the course), Ancient Greek answers to those questions will occupy center stage in this course. Those answers ranged from Callicles' deplorable "by having and fulfilling the largest desires possible" to Socrates' "by figuring out and practicing virtue" to Stoical and Epicurean "by absence of pain" to Aristotle's "with a little luck, and by training yourself to feel pleasure and pain in the right things." This course explores ancient Greek theories of happiness as the goal of human life and the role that pleasure and virtue should play in the good human life. While the material is ancient, the thoughts are of perennial interest. Designed for students interested in the ancient Greeks, philosophy, and the history of ideas, this course will include readings from important historical, philosophical, and literary texts in the western humane tradition by Plato, Aristotle, and others.

• Purposes of this class:
• To improve skills: writing, analyzing, arguing, explaining.
• To learn about and understand ancient Greek views about what human beings are here for.
• To improve and explore our selves. 
• How we go about fulfilling those purposes:
• By doing writing assignments that emphasize analyzing, explaining, and arguing.
• By slowly and carefully reading.
• By thinking seriously and hard.
  
• Two important concepts in this class.
  
• ARGUMENT. We will read a lot of arguments, engage in a lot of argument, and analyze a lot of argument in this class. An argument is a series of statements that support a claim.
• "BELIEFS" are simply claims. They must be supported by argument in this class: if it is "just what I believe," this class does not care about it.
• Assignments:
• DAILY COMMENTS: Every class session, formulate a question or observation or intelligent thought about the course material during class, jot it down, and hand it in with your name and date on it. These must be written in class and handed in in class. Prof. Bailly will not have time to respond to these individually.
• ARGUMENTS:
  
• You will be given claims which you must support based on evidence you find in the relevant readings.
  
• Arguments will generally be a page or more long (250 words or more).
  
• You must explain the author's argument, and if you wish, you may also argue against it.
  
• If you insert your own beliefs, you must argue for them, not just state them.
  
• Arguing against the author or insertion of your own beliefs must be:
• clearly separated from your explanation of the author's argument.
• over and in addition to the 250 word minimum.
• What is more, except in cases of extraordinary interest, these will not be graded.
  
• RESEARCH: You will be given one of the following:
• An article
• A topic, in which case you must find an article on JSTOR that treats that topic.
  
• The assignment is to summarize the author's main argument (what they are claiming and what evidence they use to support it).
  
• This should be at least a page long (250 words).
• Expect either an "ARGUMENT" or "RESEARCH" for each class period.
• HANDING IN ASSIGNMENTS: No late assignments will be accepted. No assignments will be accepted by email. If for some reason you are absent, you may give your Argument or Research assignment to another student and she may hand it in for you on that day.
  
• Grading:
• Students will do a lot of writing, so much that Prof. Bailly will not have time to grade it in detail. Hence he will grade about a quarter of each day's assignments in detail and simply read through to verify that the rest are done in the spirit of the assignment. So you will get a grade for about every fourth assignment, but you will not know which ones will be graded beforehand.
  
• Components of the grade will be determined by the answers to these questions:
  
• Is it interesting or impressive?
  
• Is there an argument that is clearly structured and labeled as an argument and actually is an argument?
• Is it clear what you are writing about and why one sentence or paragraph follows the one before?
• Does it form a well-rounded whole? Does the conclusion come naturally and does it satisfy?
  
• Are you careful and detailed in your approach?
  
• Are there factual mistakes or other obvious problems with how you treat the reading?
  
• Is the writing correct mechanically? (>3 errors = "no")
• Do you waste words?
• Some of the above are ambiguous: we will work on making them more precise as the semester proceeds.
• Each of the above contributes to the grade: some can hurt it but not help it, others can help it but not hurt it, and others are simply part of the grade.
  
• Your grade will be based as much on the "overall impression" of what you write as on any particular detail. In other words, I know good writing when I see it, but there is no one recipe for it, and treating the above as a checklist might not work perfectly.
  
• By the end of the semester, you will have written about 40 pages and will have been graded on about 10 of those.
  
• The FINAL GRADE will be computed as follows:

• Daily Comments	20%
  Graded Argument and Research assignments	30%
  Ungraded Argument and Research assignments	20%
  Midterm and Final	15% each

• Attendance:
• Your Daily Comments are one way I take attendance.
• You are allowed to miss 3 classes without any penalty.
• If you miss more than three, it will start to hurt your grade, because you will not have a daily comment for each day absent.
• Your Argument and Research assignments are another form of attendance.
• You are allowed to miss 3 of these. They can be on different days from the missed Daily Comments.
• If you miss more than three, it will hurt your grade considerably.
• In cases of prolonged illness or other legitimate reasons for absences that exceed the allowed three absences, please contact the dean's office to help you manage your academic and other concerns.

Unit 1:

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Book I, which I took from here: here it is again in a bare-bones format just in case that site and link go "dead."

Unit 2:

Plato, Protagoras
Plato, Gorgias

Further units will be created as needed from the following readings and perhaps others:
Plato Gorgias, Protagoras, Theaetetus.
Lucretius de Rerum Natura.
Cicero On the Ends of Good and Evil.
Seneca's Essays.