COURAGE AND THE SOUL

In 480 BCE, at Thermopylae, three hundred Spartans, led by Leonidas, held off the massive Persian army for seven days, fighting to the death with “bare hands and teeth.” For the Ancient Greeks, the behavior of the Spartans was a paradigm of courage. But what is courage? In seminar, we explore this question through Herodotus’ account of Thermopylae; Plato’s dialogue Laches, where Socrates and his interlocutors ask about the nature of courage and how to teach it; and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which he argues that all human virtues depend on courage. In language, we read poetry by Dickinson, Whitman, and Eliot that pertain to courage. In laboratory, we take a biological look at courage, both in human beings and in animals.