This list of evils is also a list of the essential ingredients of narrative fiction. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation. I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. My theory is that art is for seeing evil. It also applies to most pop songs, many lyric poems and some-though far from most-paintings, photographs and sculptures. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedies to short stories to movies. There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art I am going to propose a very simple one. My hand is forced, because without the novels my course omits something that I see as crucial to understanding death, or self-creation, or courage, or self-consciousness. Rather, the situation is this: the topic of the course requires reference to something that doesn’t show up clearly outside the space of artistic fiction. My goal in constructing my syllabus is neither to improve their moral character, nor to offer them literary entertainment. So why assign them to my students? I do acknowledge that great art affords us access to distinctive aesthetic pleasures, but I don’t see it as my job to expose students to them.

Initially, I accepted this rationale, but over the years I have come to question it: I don’t feel that reading novels has helped me navigate difficult decisions, or made me more empathetic. The (non-philosophy) professors in whose classes I read Homer and Tolstoy claimed for those texts a kind of moral authority, presenting novels as sources of personal ethical guidance. How did my syllabi wind up populated by so many novels, stories, poems and plays?Īs an undergraduate, I did not major in philosophy, perhaps in part because there were so few novels on the syllabi. I never formulated a plan to do so I never self-consciously aimed for interdisciplinarity. Looking back, I am surprised by how many pages of literature I have assigned over the years, far more than is the norm in college philosophy classes. In my class on courage, we read some Platonic dialogues, bits and pieces of Aristotelian treatises and all 24 books of Homer’s Iliad. I pair Plato’s Euthyphro with Sophocles’s Antigone, because they offer contrasting portraits of the clash between human and divine law. I teach Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Descartes’s Meditations: they are both about what it’s like to be trapped in one’s own head, looking for a way out. In my class on the philosophical puzzles surrounding self-creation, we read contemporary philosophical essays-and we also read novels by James Joyce and Elena Ferrante. But I also assign Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair, Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”-a poem I strongly disagree with. Like all my classes, it is a philosophy class, so of course I assign the seminal philosophical texts on that topic. Got weird shaped windows? Not to worry! All of our art deco roller blinds are custom made to order.I teach a class called “Death,” on the question of whether it is rational to be afraid of death. Is it time to revamp your boring room? Are you sick of your old curtains or shutters? Why not order something from this art deco blinds collection! We have so many designs to choose from! Designs filled with bright colours? We got it! Darker more abstract art designs? We got those too! There is something for everybody in this art deco blind catalogue! Come and have a look now!Īdd a splash of colour to your room with some art blindsįrom pinks to greens to blues to oranges, we have designs in every colour in our art deco roller blind collection! Everybody who comes round to your house will be so jealous of your brand new piece of home decor! They will want to copy you and order one too! You will be a new trend setter on your street!

Art print window blinds