
Concluding Lecture: Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature
Tamar Gendler closes out Yale's Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature (PHIL 181) by reviewing the semester through four lenses. She revisits the course's three goals: introducing philosophy through central texts, testing philosophical questions against approaches from other disciplines, and considering how disciplines complement each other. She then traces how students' thinking on happiness and flourishing, morality, and political legitimacy may have shifted, before pulling out three unifying themes: the multi-part soul, luck and control, and the relation between individual and society. She closes by returning to three quotations from Plato, Aristotle, and Epictetus that anchored the course. Recorded in Spring 2011 as the final session of the Open Yale Courses lecture series, it functions as a structured recap rather than new material, useful for anyone who has followed the earlier lectures.