CLAS

The anachronism of the course title constitutes our program: to what extent can Plato’s thinking about artworks, images, poets in the polis, beauty, the visual world, the senses, subjectivity and criticism be viewed coherently as an aesthetic theory? Does his style and dramatic mode of writing interact significantly with these views? How have they been received, and to what extent are they right?  A. Pop. Winter.

I shall discuss Leo Strauss’s “Notes on Lucretius” (1968) and Lucretius’ De rerum natura with a special focus on the relation of philosophy and poetry. H. Meier. Spring.