What is wisdom? And what is its supposed opposite, folly? How are we to act in the world when the world does not behave as we expect? Is the human being rational by nature? Or irrational? In this 12-meeting seminar we will proceed chronologically through a dozen classic Western texts that invite the deepest exploration of these questions.

Starting with the ancient philosopher-poets Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes, proceeding through the Bible’s suffering sage, Job, and Socrates’ classic trial-defense, the Apology, we will move into the modern period with works from Erasmus and Shakespeare that challenge simplistic understandings of wisdom by their complex portrayals of folly and madness.

We conclude the course with great existential thinkers who grappled with the tension between the rational and the irrational parts of the soul—Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

The seminar explores both philosophical and narrative approaches to deeply philosophical questions (Job, Euripides’ The Bacchae, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Voltaire’s Candide, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground) along with other works that read more like intellectual autobiographies than philosophical treatises (Ecclesiastes, Plato’s Apology, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Montaigne’s “On Experience”).