The Power of Ideas

Overview

We all have ideas about love, friendship, abortion, war.  We have ideas about art, justice, the proper role of government even about the nature of knowledge and of reality.   John Maynard Keynes famously observed that “[t]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”

The very idea of history implies an understanding of the history of ideas.  Plato believed ideas were pure being, archetypes compared to which real objects could at best be imperfect replicas.  Aristotle held that ideas or concepts are formed by man’s mind, organizing sense data according to the rules of logic.  Thus, for Aristotle and other like-minded thinkers, ideas are based ultimately on sense experience.

Immanuel Kant, by contrast, claimed that ideas were products of reason that are transcendent but fundamentally nonempirical.  Hegel saw ideas as absolute truth the complete and ultimate product of reason.  Marx thought ideas were largely irrelevant to the great sweep of history, and that economic and technological forces were the engines of the evolution of societies.

Art, literature, and music include ideas that move us.  Ideologies and religions comprise ideas often used to move others.  By integrating different ideas about how humans think and act, we give students an intellectual framework with which to understand history, themselves, and the surrounding world.

Courses

Seminar: Art History 81FCS Ideas of Alexander the Great

Sheila Dillon, Associate Professor, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

This course has a deliberately tight focus on a single historical figure, Alexander the Great; but it uses him as a point of departure for exploring a wide range of issues and problems involved in the study of individuals and individual agency in the ancient world.   Some of the topics we will consider include the historiographical problems of finding the “real” Alexander; the geographical and logistical factors involved in his military campaigns; and the lasting impact of his image upon ancient artistic production and royal iconography.

But the course will take us far beyond Alexander’s own world, to examine his legacy and impact.  We will explore: what the Romans made of him, the Medieval Alexander tradition, his importance in post-renaissance western art, his significance in modern Greek politics, as well as his current appeal to Hollywood movie-makers.  Tracing how ideas of Alexander have been constructed and transmitted through time provides a fascinating case study of the formation and continual reinterpretation of the western classical tradition, and of the pivotal role individuals can play in shaping history.  The impact Alexander had on the Hellenistic world was profound, yet his importance and interest stem just as much from the perpetual fascination he has exerted over the ages.  Not many individuals in world history have assumed this guise of “Man for All Seasons”: you should reach the end of this course with some appreciation of why Alexander did.

In other words, this course aims to provide a detailed approach to the legacy and impact of one of history's most incomparably famous, epoch-changing figures.  Its focus is not so much on the “historical facts” about the “real” Alexander, as on the Alexander–traditions that developed in Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, and early modern times.  These serve as ways of approaching significant issues concerning the reception of Antiquity, the malleability of traditions, the agency of “Great Men” versus collective entities in the writing of history, and the various forms of cultural production generated from the image and achievements of such a powerfully symbolic figure as Alexander the Great.
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Seminar: English 81FCS Modern Reason —Promise or Predicament?  Understanding the Enlightenment

Thomas Pfau, Eads Family Professor, Departments of English and Germanic Languages & Literature

Our focus in this course will be on the emergence of modern rationalism in politics, economics, and moral philosophy between 1690 and 1790.  Our principal writers will be Locke, Adam Smith, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot, and Kant. At the same time, other equally important writers take an increasingly critical and skeptical view of the claims of modern instrumental reason.  They question its historical “legitimacy,” while also noting modern rationality’s apparent lack of a coherent framework, as well as its inability to articulate ends relative to which human practice could be judged as intrinsically meaningful. Some of the writers we’ll consider are Anthony Ashley Cooper (3rd Earl of Shaftesbury), Jean–Jacques Rousseau, and Edmund Burke. Some secondary readings in contemporary moral and political philosophy (Hannah Arendt, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, et al.) will help clarify the extent to which the discourse of the Enlightenment remains unresolved and central to our own situation today.
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Seminar: Political Science 85FCS Reason, Virtue & Rights

Gary Hull, Senior Lecturing Fellow, Department of Sociology

People claim to have all sorts of rights.  Some say they have a right to health care, education, housing.  Others claim a right to free abortions, a job, equal pay.  Some industries want the right to restrict foreign imports, while some politicians want to limit political speech.  Still others assert a right to life, liberty and property.

This course investigates the various “rights claims” that exist today and throughout history.  We will explore the various arguments for and consequences of those claims.  In addition, we will look at some of the presuppositions—in ethics and epistemology—of those theories of rights.  Throughout the course, we will shuttle back and forth between major cultural movements and the theories that give rise to them.

We will read selected excerpts from thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and various twentieth century figures.
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Focus 99 Special Topics in Focus: The Power of Ideas

Students faculty will meet weekly in this half-credit course to discuss issues of common interest that bridge the topics of individual seminar courses.
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