We will begin with a reading and discussion of a passage in Homer which describes the making of the shield of Achilles and W. H. Auden’s poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” Homer describes the poetic production in miniature of the beauty and brutality of life in the archaic Greek cities. Auden's poem of the same name provides a powerfully disenchanted vision with an ambiguous intention: have we inherited a modern world whose rationalism is unique and inhuman, or is he showing us what has always been the case from Achilles’ time to our own?

We will read four essays that in various ways reassess or challenge the results of the Enlightenment on the grounds that the modern notion of reason threatens to undermine the meaning of human life. These critiques imply quite different ways of recovering human meaning.

To understand the broad sense of this challenge, we will begin (and end) the course by reading some poems that illustrate the theme of the relation between human experience and significance, on the one hand, and reason (or philosophy and science) on the other.

The essays we will read are:

Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture"

Strauss, "Political Philosophy and History"

Klein, "Modern Rationalism"

Rosen, "A Modest Proposal to Rethink Enlightenment"