Prof. Wareh's Course Pages > Poetry & the Cosmos > Course Description

• How is our universe put together?
• How does it work?
• Who or what controls it?
• And what does it all mean?

We will read ancient Greek and Roman poets' answers to these questions, from Hesiod's traditional-but-innovative poems about the origin and nature of the gods and the universe, to the striking and beautiful theories with which the Pre-Socratic philosophers challenged traditional ideas. Turning to the Roman world, we consider Lucretius' poetic masterpiece On the Nature of Things, a tantalizing blend of atomic physics, epic poetry, dark meditations on human existence, and the passionate intensity of an (anti-religious) street preacher ("My philosophy will change your life!"). Additional readings in the cosmological imagination may include both ancient and modern poems.

The first answers to the big questions about the cosmos were sung by poets, who wove together mythology, imagination, religion, and their archaic scientific conceptions to explain the world to their audiences. But in ancient Greece, new ways of scientific and philosophical thinking were rapidly developing. Students in Poetry & the Cosmos read ancient poems expressing both of these perspectives on the natural order of the world and discover the surprising ways in which they were never fully separated from each other.

The relationship in this poetry between imagination and revelation, on the one hand, and observation and reasoning, on the other hand, raises several interesting issues which we will explore:

• Should we agree with Aristotle about the relationship between traditional poetry and philosophical poetry? ("Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except for their poetic meter, so that it's right to call Homer a poet, but Empedocles rather a 'writer on nature' [physiologos]." Poetics 1447b18)
• How have conceptions of the natural world (biological and physical) been influenced by the structures and laws of our moral world (social and political)?
• Some ancient thinkers insist that our understanding of the physical world will totally transform our moral lives as human beings. Was that really possible? Might it still be possible? Or is there a line between faith in science and science as (quasi-religious) faith?
• What does it mean to imagine major physical principles (elements, atoms, attractive & repulsive forces, evolutionary history of organisms) in the absence of "solid" experimental proof? How can the history of modern scientific discovery help us appreciate the role of the imagination? How and why have major modern scientists and philosophers of science sometimes urged the renewed study of the Pre-Socratics?
• Was Plato just prudently settling for the possible when he turned his back on many of his predecessors' "scientific" projects and focused on human life and the objects of human thought?
• What remains possible and impossible about philosophical poetry, if we explore the modern analogues to this kind of writing, imagination, and message?