1.  Students will gain knowledge of important historical, 
philosophical, and religious developments in Western Antiquity

2. Students will be introduced to philosophical and ethical 
problems from Antiquity through primary texts exclusively 
(students will read the original sources)

3. Students will study how the major metaphysical issues of the 
West developed and evolved from the fifth century BCE to the 
fifth century CE (they will learn the mutual influences of 
classical ethics and Abrahamic ethics)

4. Students will understand the different approaches to ethical 
problems, such as different schools’ approaches to slavery, 
capital punishment, torture, when some crimes (such as thievery) 
are excusable, what is the definition of a good moral life, and 
the role of civil law in ethical issues

5. Students will learn how historians and ethicists answer 
questions about the past through evidence-based research

6. Students will produce writing and research appropriate to the 
subject matter of the course and to the discipline of classics

I.  Plato

II. Aristotle

III. Epicureanism

IV. Stoicism

V. What is a good life, how that question is the primary 
question of an ethical West

VI. The development of a rewards-based afterlife in the West, 
from Homer to Augustine

VII. Jewish and “Pagan” mutual influence on ethical writings in 
the first and second centuries, CE

VIII. Cicero and what is the morally right thing to do

IX. Epictetus, stoicism, and how to be an ethical person in a 
world where one has no power

X. The practice of ethics, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius: One 
cannot be perfect, so how philosophers understand the importance 
of practice

XI. Fate, the omnipotence of God, and pre-destination: Are we 
just stuck? Cicero to Augustine

XII. The inheritance: Christianity and Islam’s debt to classical 
ethical philosophies