Office hours: I'll be
splitting my time between Durham and Boulder this spring, but when I'm in
Durham I'll generally be working in my office during the day. I'll try to
remember to make an announcement in class about my schedule for the week ahead.
The Course
The goal of this seminar is
to reach an understanding of how the idea of a free will arose, in European
culture, in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. We will split our time, each
week, between philosophical material and literary material. One of the challenges
of the seminar will be to respond to these very different sorts of texts, and
to attempt to bring them into conversation with each other.
Course Expectations
Seminar grades will be based
on students’ written work. Seminar participants will decide for
themselves, in consultation with me, on the exact nature of that work, and on
the deadlines for completing it. Options will range from, at one extreme, a
series of weekly writing assignments, to, at the other extreme, a single long
research paper.
Attendance and participation
in the seminar is of course mandatory.
Middle English Texts
All of the literary texts are
written in Middle English. Chaucer's Middle English is on the easier end of
things, and you might be able to read it with decent fluency in the
original. The Middle English of Piers Plowman is harder, and the
content of the reading is harder too. The Middle English of Sir Gawain is
harder still, because it is written in a northern English dialect that's at
some remove from modern English.
Below I suggest various
options for each of the texts we'll look at. You'll have to decide for yourself
how challenging you want to make this element of the course.
Course Schedule
[ first half of class / second half of class ]
Please let me know if any of the links below are not working!
January 14. Introduction / Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 1-2
This first class will offer an overview of the intellectual context of medieval philosophy and the specific themes of the semester. We will then start to get into Boethius's Consolation, focusing on his conception of happiness as the end of human life, and the role of fortune in our lives.
January 21. Consolation
3 / Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde Books 1-2
The first half of class will
continue with Boethius and the themes from the previous week. In the second
half of class we will make our first foray into English literature, by
considering how Chaucer draws on Boethian ideas to frame the love story between
Troilus and Criseyde.
[The Chaucer text is long and you'll want to spend a little time at the start figuring out which version of the text you want to use.
January 28. Consolation 4 / Troilus and Criseyde Books 3-4
We will start by looking at the idea of fate in Boethius, as drawn from Stoicism, and we will compare that
to the way Chaucer develops his story.
February 4. Consolation 5 / Troilus and Criseyde Book 5
Finally, not so much reading this week.
The big idea in Book 5 of the Consolation is God's eternal mode of existence. We'll focus on what divine eternality is, for Boethius, and how it's supposed to reconcile divine foreknowledge and human freedom.
With respect to Chaucer, we will focus on how we should understand the concluding stanzas of the poem. Once you get to line 1806 (end of stanza 258), which is where the final plot development is set out, pay close attention to the final lines that come after this. Here Chaucer seems to try out various (conflicting?) ways of explaining what the significance of the poem is. Do we have any good reason to think that any of these remarks reflects Chaucer's own attitude toward the poem? Or are these speeches all themselves to be understood as lying at a distance from what Chaucer himself might think?
February 11. Epictetus / Augustine, Confessions Book 8.
I've linked to a couple of key chapters from Epictetus's Discourses. This is his more detailed, lengthy work. His somewhat better known Handbook is more epigrammatic, and so less useful for serious philosophical study, but it's still important to look at, if you want to think about Epictetus at any length. I see the Confessions as growing out of Epictetus inasmuch as Augustine very much sees his basic trouble as a trouble over his unruly volitions/wills, just as Epictetus does. If Augustine could control those, his task would be complete. What makes Augustine unStoic, however, is that he does not think he has the power to control his own wills. In that sense, to the question of whether he has freedom of (i.e. over) the will, Augustine's answer is No. He needs God for that.
February 18. Peter Abelard, Ethics / Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The original language of Sir Gawain is quite difficult, for reasons explained above, and I don't recommend it unless you're coming to the class with prior experience in Middle English. There are a lot of good translations, however, and I recommend the Tolkien translation, here.
February 25. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) on determinism / Christine de Pizan, Vision Book 2
March 4. Anselm, Fall of the Devil
--Spring Break--
March 18. Thomas Aquinas on will
March 25. Peter John Olivi, Summa II.57-58 / Chaucer, Clerk’s Tale [text with interlinear translation here]
April 1. Langland, Piers Plowman
Given the difficulty of Piers Plowman, you need a translation, and given the length of what we'll be reading, I think it's worth your while to buy a print copy. Also, there are two clear options here: you should get either the Norton edition with Donaldson's translation alone [used copies here], or the Norton "critical edition" that has the Donaldson plus the original Middle English on facing pages [used copies here]. You don't want to use anything other than one of these two texts, because Piers Plowman survives in at least three different versions. We're following the B-text. If you use a different edition you may well find yourself reading a totally different version of the poem.
April 8. Scotus, Ordinatio II.6.2 / Scotus, Ordinatio III.37
April 15. Ockham, Quodlibet I.20 & III.14
April 22. Student Presentations