Professor Gendler begins with a poll of the class about whether students have elected to take a voluntary no-Internet pledge, and distributes stickers to help students who have made the pledge stick to their resolve. She then moves to the substantive part of the lecture, where she introduces Plato’s analogy between the city-state and the soul and articulates Plato’s response to Glaucon’s challenge: justice is a kind of health--the well-ordered working of each of the parts of the individual—and thus is intrinsically valuable. This theme is explored further via psychological research on the ‘progress principle’ and ‘hedonic treadmill,’ as well as in an introduction to Aristotle’s argument that reflection and reasoning are the function of humanity and thus the highest good.

1. Introduction
2. The Ring of Gyges: Morality and Hypocrisy
3. Parts of the Soul I
4. Parts of the Soul II
5. The Well-Ordered Soul: Happiness and Harmony
6. The Disordered Soul: Thémis and PTSD
7. Flourishing and Attachment
8. Flourishing and Detachment
9. Virtue and Habit I
10. Virtue and Habit II
11. Weakness of the Will and Procrastination
12. Utilitarianism and its Critiques
13. Deontology
14. The Trolley Problem
15. Empirically-informed Responses
16. Philosophical Puzzles
17. Punishment I
18. Punishment II
19. Contract & Commonwealth: Thomas Hobbes
20. The Prisoner's Dilemma
21. Equality
22. Equality II
23. Social Structures
24. Censorship
25. Tying up Loose Ends
26. Concluding Lecture

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures.