This assignment consists of three short selections from very different sources, but you will some overlap in the ideas discussed.
• Plato, Republic, bk. VII, 517b-521b
This selection begins right after the Allegory of the Cave. You read the first half of what’s included here when we discussed that allegory a month ago.
• selections from the Roman Stoics on cosmopolitanism:
• Seneca, On Leisure (Dialogues to Serenus, VIII), III (sel.) and IV
• Epictetus, Discourses, I.9 and II.5 (sels.)
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV.4 and X.6
Stoicism is a philosophical movement that began shortly after the time of Plato and was influential for centuries. These selections, which date from the early Roman Empire, come from near the end of its period of greatest influence. All of them include a characteristic Stoic idea—that the universe (cosmos) is like a state (polis) with all rational beings as its citizens—but they present and apply this idea in a number of different ways.
• John Donne, Meditation 17 from Devotions on Emergent Occasions
This is drawn from a group of 23 “devotions”—each consisting of a meditation, an “expostulation,” and a prayer—that Donne published in 1624 after recovering from a serious illness.
I’m not making an ungraded assignment for this discussion, but you should (as always) come to the discussion with questions.