INQ-120 | Choosing the Good Life

Full Title: Choosing the Good Life

Topic Description:

The premise of this course is that life, like art, is about making choices, good and bad. Focusing on several dramas and supplemental, relevant readings, students in this course will examine choices made by playwrights and by the characters in their dramas and will then reflect on those choices and their consequences and the relevance of both to their own lives. Students will consider the choices made by playwrights from Sophocles to Ionesco and from non-dramatic writers from Plato to Sartre and will be then asked to reflect not only on their own reactions to those writers but also on the reactions of their peers. The overarching ethical questions that will form the thematic core of the course will include: What is the good life? How is the good life achieved? How do we connect our choices to our personal search for the good life?

Counts as Global? No

Topic Approved: November 2009