Ethics is my “flagship” course, being a course that I have taught every semester, including summer, since the beginning…although I have only been teaching a bit over a year. Anyway, this course is the closest one I have to accomplishing all of the goals I had set forth below (although I am trying some new things out this semester, so only time will tell if this is an improvement or not). However, I am rethinking all of my courses, and I am going to start here. This is an unabashedly canonical Western philosophy course, unlike some of my other courses. Despite its limitations, it is useful because, when given chronologically, there is a story that runs through the 2.4 millenia since Plato, and that story is useful for instruction. These are the philosophers that I have used so far:
1.Plato
2. Aristotle
3. Hobbes
4. Locke
5. Spinoza
6. Kant
7. Mill
8. Nietzsche
9. Rawls
10. Nussbaum
This is usually bolstered here and there with some Dewey and sections from the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I have never taught all of these in a single semester, but it had been the basic outline for the first three semesters. This semester, I am trying out one of those “Reacting to the Past” games, Athens 403 bc, to teach Plato’s Republic in November, almost topping off a semester that started with Plato’s Apology, Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Spinoza’s Ethics. I really want to do Nietzsche before the end, but I do not like leaving students with Nietzsche. His ideas tend to be explosive and sometimes depressing for students, and I have actually found great use of Aristotle after Nietzsche, despite the lack of chronology there.
Natural Causes 