This course offers students an opportunity to study the wisdom literature of the ancient world, literature that has shaped the ideas, values and beliefs of human communities throughout history. We will be studying texts from Asia, the Middle East, and Mediterranean Europe that reflect the religious and cultural characteristics of specific societies but also transcend the boundaries between those societies in compelling ways.

Texts in the tradition include works like the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the wisdom books of the Old Testament, Plato’s Phaedo, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Careful consideration of these ancient texts reveals that the cultural differences that shape societies are balanced by a language of shared concerns and "big questions": how to live a good life; how to face the inevitability of death; how to relate to others and to the natural world; how to confront the problem of evil. They teach us that the main human issues do not change very much over time and are not exclusive to any one group of people on the planet. During the semester we will work carefully through a range of representative wisdom texts and think about the issues and questions they raise in light of our circumstances in 2021.