Our next course offering in the Study With Sadler Academy is now open for enrollment. I am once again teaching a class that has proven not only to be a big draw but also (from students’ reports) a rich, deep, and enjoyable learning experience: Ancient Philosophers On Friendship!

The class meets for 12 weekly 90-minute sessions, scheduled on Thursdays 9:00 AM Central Time, starting with the first session on July 2, and ending on September 17. Each week, we will examine and discuss some key ancient philosophical works focused on friendship, its nature and types, common problems or issues that arise, and a number of other related topics.

Here’s the course site where you can find out more and enroll in the class.

The Curriculum For The Class

Below is the schedule of the texts and thinkers we will be studying together over the 12 weeks of the class. Each of the texts we study is provided in PDF form to students in the course website.

I’ve selected these authors and works to provide us a good mix of schools and key authors on the topics. Quite a few of the later texts and thinkers reference the earlier ones, so we will also in a way get to sit in on a centuries-long conversation between philosophers!

Week 1 — Platonic Perspectives On Friendship

• Plato, Lysis
• Plato, Republic book 1 (selections)

Week 2 — Aristotelian Perspectives On Friendship

• Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics book 1 (selections)
• Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics book 8

Week 3 — Aristotelian Perspectives On Friendship

• Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics book 9
• Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics book 7

Week 4 — Epicurean Perspectives On Friendship

• Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings
• Lucretius, On The Nature of Things (selections)
• Cicero, On The Ends, book 1 (selections)

Week 5 — Cicero’s Perspectives On Friendship

• Cicero, On Friendship

Week 6 — Stoic Perspectives On Friendship

• Seneca, Letters 3, 6, 9, 19, 35, 48, 63, 74, 77, 109
• Seneca, On The Happy Life (selections)

Week 7 — Stoic Perspectives On Friendship

• Seneca, On Benefits, books 1–4
• Seneca, Letter 81

Week 8 — Stoic Perspectives On Friendship

• Seneca, On Benefits, books 5–7

Week 9 — Platonic Perspectives On Friendship

• Plutarch, How to Tell A Flatterer From A Friend
• Plutarch, On Having Many Friends

Week 10 — Cynic Perspectives On Friendship

• Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 1, 3, 12, 38, 74

Week 11 — Stoic Perspectives On Friendship

• Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion (selections)

Week 12 — Comedic/Cynic Perspectives On Friendship

• Lucian, Toxaris or On Friendship
• Lucian, The Parasite

Topics The Class Explores

This class focuses on philosophical accounts, analyses, and arguments that bear upon friendship and on other interconnected topics. Thinking about friendship inevitably bleeds over into other related matters, which range from the nature of human beings, to how we ought to live our lives, to obligations we have towards other people, and many other topics and fields of study. Friendship is also connected with the human emotions, particularly those of care, desire, affection, and love.

What we do together in this class is examining a number of these important matters. It also leads students into a number of well-thought-out viewpoints on the nature, value, and even types of friendships. These perspectives derive from the existing works of philosophers in ancient Mediterranean (sometimes called “Greco-Roman”) culture, in which great minds make sense of their own experiences, work through puzzles and problems, reflect upon our social, affective, and rational nature, oriented by the need to understand this common reality of friendship.

The reading selections have been chosen with several goals in mind. One of these goals is to focus upon what have come to be viewed as absolutely central texts in the philosophy of friendship, such as books 8–9 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s On Friendship, and Seneca’s On Benefits

A second goal is to broaden the range of the issues and matters that we consider as we attempt to understand the nature and norms of friendship. For example: What do we owe to friends, and how should we view the opposite of friends, i.e. enemies? How can we tell a genuine friend from a fake friend or a flatterer?

Yet another goal is providing a good range of approaches drawn from the schools of ancient Western philosophy. The Platonic tradition is represented not only by Plato himself, but also by the middle Platonist Plutarch. The Aristotelian, Epicurean, and Stoic schools are also well represented in this class. We will also be engaging with more eclectic thinkers as well, who draw upon multiple approaches, like Cicero, Dio Chrysostom, and Lucian.

More About The Course

This is a synchronous online, open-enrollment philosophy course in the Study With Sadler Academy. Two of those descriptive terms might be unfamiliar to some readers, so I thought it could be helpful to give brief explanations of them here.

“Synchronous” means that the class meets for regular interactive sessions. In this case, we will be meeting once a week for 90-minute class sessions (sometimes we might go longer if students have a lot of questions or want to engage in a lot of discussion).

We use Zoom as the platform for meetings, and students have the options to go on camera or not, and to use their mike or just communicate in the chat. We record each of the class sessions, and host the recordings in the class site, allowing students to go back and watch or listen to the videorecordings as often as they would like to.

“Open-Enrollment” means that anyone who is interested can enroll as a student. The course is not for academic credit, and is open to adult learners of any educational level. My students include everyone from working people interested in philosophy, to retired lifelong learners, to college and graduate students interested in the topics, to fellow academic professors.

There aren’t any grades for the class, and there aren’t any assignments that students are required to complete. The class is for personal enrichment, fostering and deepening one’s interest in and understanding of philosophy, led by me as the instructor and designer.

Each week of the course, I will be lecturing on and leading discussion of the texts assigned for that week. If you’ve ever taken a class with me, or seen videos of my class sessions, events, or talks, you know that my style of lecturing is interactive, engaging with students through dialogue, examples and applications, and question and answer. In smaller classes like these, where we usually have less than 20 students attending, there’s plenty of time for students to get clarification about anything they find confusing.

I’m a big fan of developing and providing handouts on the material we’re studying to students in all of my courses, whether traditional academic or open-enrollment. For each week of this class, I supply one or more downloadable handouts on the texts, thinkers, topics, arguments, or distinctions we are focusing upon. This time around, I’m planning on also producing worksheets that students can use to apply the concepts we’re studying to their own lives and relationships.

If you’d like to hear more about this class from me, the instructor, I have a video you’re welcome to watch.

If you’re interested in enrolling, you can go right here to do so. I hope you’ll consider the course, and I’m looking forward to teaching it again!

Gregory Sadler is the founderof ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of highly popular YouTube videos on classic and contemporary philosophy. He is co-founder of The Stoic Heart, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast and the Mind & Desire podcast.

If you’d like to support his ongoing work, bringing philosophy to the broader public, he has a Patreon site where you can donate. You can also make a one time donation at Buy Me A Coffee.

You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to learn about upcoming events, classes, and offers, you can get on his mailing list at Substack. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.

New Section of “Ancient Philosophers On Friendship” Now Enrolling! was originally published in Practical Rationality on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.