Truth and the Meaning of Life

In this Honors FIG, “Good, Beauty, and the Meaning of Life,” students will focus on some of the deepest, hardest, and most central questions we confront in our lives. The class will approach these questions by reading and discussing both classic philosophical works and some recent studies engaged with these perennial issues. The course is really concerned with the question of whether human beings can have good lives and, if so, what such lives look like. The course will consider a variety of answers: the good life is devoted to such things as self-examination and critical thinking, political engagement, religious devotion, renunciation of external goods, virtue, happiness, and pleasure. Students will consider whether life has any meaning at all, and if not, what we do in response to such a finding. The course will conclude with philosophical essays on the meaning and importance of death and our mortality.