Arts & Ideas

cultivates reading skills

by sharing concerns and sensibilities

of people within specific cultures

at specific times. Arts and Ideas

complements a course by that title

at the University of Baltimore.

 

Syllabus Readings

Telling Stories

I Fighting Trojans

Homer: The Iliad

Gods  The Trojan War

Time Line Bullfinch Britannica Durant

 

 

II Building Athens

Tragedy

Aeschylus: The Agamemnon

Aristotle: Poetics

History

Herodotus: Gyges   Croesus

Thucydides: Pericles

Plutarch: Pericles  Lycurgus Solon

Philosophy

Aristotle:  Pride   Magnanimity  

Metaphysics Poetics

Plato:  The Symposium Light  

The Parable of the Cave  The Divided Line

Heraclitus: Fragments Zeno: Paradoxes

III Illuminating Love

Medieval Lyrics

Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde

Middle English Troilus and Criseyde

Capellanus: The Art of Courtly Love

St Augustine: Confessions

Innocent III: On Misery

 

IV Distinguishing Perspectives

Pico della Mirandola: On Dignity

Machiavelli: The Prince

Botticelli's Florence

Titian's Venice

Shakespeare: Othello

 

V Mapping Directions

Bacon: The New Organon

Galileo: The Starry Messenger

Harvey: The Motion of the Heart

Darwin: Evolution

 

VI Creating Self & Society

Blake

Songs of Innocence 

Songs of Experience 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Goya