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What is wisdom—and its supposed opposite, folly? How are we to act in the world when the world does not behave as we expect? Are we fundamentally rational creatures? How do we deal with irrationality—in ourselves and the world?

In this 12-week seminar study, we will proceed chronologically through several classic Western texts that have invited the deepest exploration of these questions. We’ll start with the ancient philosopher-poets Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes, proceeding through the Bible’s suffering sage, Job, to Socrates’ classic trial-defense, the Apology. From there we will move into the modern period with works from Erasmus and Shakespeare that challenge simplistic understandings of wisdom by their complex portrayals of folly and madness.
We conclude the study with great existential thinkers who grappled with the tension between the rational and the irrational parts of the soul—Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

The course leans philosophically but also includes several narratives that raise philosophical questions (Job, Euripides’The Bacchae, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Voltaire’s Candide, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground) and other works that read more like intellectual autobiographies than philosophical treatises (Ecclesiastes, Plato’s Apology, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Montaigne’s “On Experience”).