ES.113 | Spring 2016 | Undergraduate

Ancient Greek Philosophy and Mathematics

Calendar

WEEK # TOPICS KEY DATES
1 Introduction  
I. Knowing
2

A. Logos as Definition: What is “What is?”

B. Knowledge as Power / Knowledge as Virtue

 
3

C. Definition and the Essence of Things

D. The Idea of a Proof

 
II. Logos and Arithmos
4

Quality, Quantity, Relation, Multitude, Magnitude, Logos as Ratio

The Greek Conception of Number (What’s Not a Number?)

 
III. Measuring the Unmeasurable
5 A. Putting the Irrational in Ratio  
6 B. Fitting Ideas to the World First Paper Due
7 C. The Pursuit of Truth and the Idea of an Idea  
8 & 9 D. The Truth as a Surd Re-write Due
10 E. Potentiality as a Way of Being  
IV. The Limits of Mathematics?
11 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics  
12 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (cont.)  
V. The Modern Conception of Number and the Detachment from Reality
13 Isaac Newton’s Arithmetica Universalis  
14

“The World of Physics and the ‘Natural World”

“The Sources of Modern Symbolic Mathematics”

Second Paper Due

Course Info

Instructor
As Taught In
Spring 2016