Teaching Core Texts of Moral and Political Thought

Wide-scope survey courses in the history of political thought are a great challenge both to teach and to take as a student. Texts like Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Augustine’s City of God can be difficult for undergraduates to read profitably the first time around. Teaching them can be just as daunting due to their immense and intimidating scope.

To help both educators and their students, I’m sharing reading/discussion questions for the full year’s set of texts from my Contemporary Civilization class, which I taught at Columbia University for four years. I would circulate these questions to students at the end every class for the subsequent class’ readings. The questions provide them with a rough guide for their reading and with thematic focus. The questions also provide a basis for class discussion.

As I prepped for CC in the summer of 2015, I was struck by the dearth of useful discussion questions available online. This page is my small attempt to improve the situation. I offer these materials freely to be used and adapted by anyone, so long as they are not privatized or used in a for-profit capacity. Please also note that the questions reflect my own and my students’ interests in these texts and the selections we teach in CC. I hope they’re useful!

I also have begun developing a new version of Introduction to Political Theory taking what I call a conceptual literacy approach, and am sharing the work-in-progress materials here.

Fall Semester:

Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito

Plato: Republic

Aristotle I: Nicomachean Ethics

Aristotle II: Nicomachean Ethics and Politics

Aristotle III: Politics

Hebrew Bible: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Job, Ecclesiastes

Christian Scripture: Matthew, Romans, Galatians

Augustine I: City of God

Augustine II: City of God

Qur’an

Medieval Philosophy: Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan; Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error or Autobiography