Welcome to our summer program! Students may apply to only one of the available programs. Both programs run concurrently, and most excursions are shared between the two groups.
Beauty has long been intertwined with the divine — from Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus to Dante’s Comedy. Yet the relationship between beauty and the sacred has always been complex, both in religion and in philosophy. Some modern voices have even declared beauty obsolete, claiming that art itself is dead. What role should beauty play in philosophy today? How does it relate to the sacred? And what distinguishes an idol from an icon? These are the kinds of questions we will explore together, both in class discussions and during our excursions in Rome.
Greek political theory was rooted in the life of small city-states. But the vast scale of the Roman Empire posed new challenges—questions that remain strikingly relevant to our own large modern political communities. Can a republic thrive, or even survive, as it expands? How did the transformation from city-states to empire shape the very ideals and types of citizens that could emerge? What virtues—and what vices—belong to a republic, and which to an empire? And in what ways does Rome’s development continue to speak to us today? These are the kinds of questions we will explore together in this class and during the excursions in Rome.
