Achilles' Shield celebrates the extraordinary vigor of life on this earth. It is also Homer's hopeful vision of a world moving toward peace as its citizens work in concert with nature and each other. Thus Achilles' Shield is a fitting icon for a course that asks, "What does it mean to be a human being living in society?"
Character is destiny.
--Heraclitus
Humans’ Purpose
- Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Book 1: nature and purpose of humans
Book 2: achieving eudaimonia through living virtuously - Pericles’ “Funeral Oration”
- “A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty
- “Ithaca” by Cavafy
- “My Wood” by E. M. Forster
- “Man” by George Herbert
- “Ode to Man” from Antigone
- “What a Piece of Work is a Man” from Hamlet
- Psalm 8
Ideal Order
- Achilles' Shield
- "I Have a Dream"
Solution through Violence
- Medea
- Antigone
- Movies: Antwone Fisher, Chicago, Crash, Gone Baby Gone, Hurt Locker, Rendition, Shawshank Redemption, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill
Solution through Persuasion
- “Crito” by Plato
- Lysistrata by Aristophanes
- “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift
- “Declaration of Independence” by Thomas Jefferson
- "Left Handers" by Roger Guffy
- "The Vertical Negro Plan" by Harry Golden
- “Civil Disobedience” by Thoreau
- “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- “Address to the Prisoners of Cook County Jail” by Clarence Darrow
- “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr.
Synthesis of Course Main Ideas
Created by Dorothy McCaughey 01/15/2011
Louisiana State University