An Academic Course: Anger, Justice, and Action

the readings and structure for a course I recently taught

Readers, listeners, viewers, and other occasional people have sometimes responded to my post about academic classes I’ve taught with requests that I share my syllabi online. I usually point out that, given all the boilerplate stuff we have to pack into them, they’d likely find them rather boring, confusing, or unhelpful. What they usually have in mind, as generally becomes clear in subsequent online dialogue, are the readings that my students are assigned and that we examine and discuss during class sessions.

In my now more than 25 years of teaching college-level classes, I have taught several hundreds of class sections (I expect — I’d have to do the work of counting them!) and dozens of different courses. Most of those courses have been within the discipline of Philosophy, but some have been Religious Studies, Literature, or Humanities. As it happens, the first course that I’m providing the reading list for was a Philosophy course (though listed as a Humanities elective), but in its earlier versions it was a Core class at Marquette University.

I was asked to teach an upper level Core class that bears the rather ambitious title “Service Of Faith And Promotion Of Justice.” It’s the type of course that instructors can focus on a wide range of topics and interests, and it gets taught by both Philosophy and Theology instructors. I decided, since I do so much writing, presentations, talks, and work with clients on the emotion of anger that I’d focus the class on that.

The faith aspect would be easy enough, since some of the authors on anger I use place it in religious perspectives. The justice aspect was a natural fit as well, not just because anger as an emotion is connected with perceptions of justice, but also because one main reason people often say anger could be appropriate is that it might be useful or even necessary for seeking justice.

So, I taught three sections of that course at Marquette University in the past, using a lot of the same readings as I would in my most recent version of the class, but also Martha Nussbaum’s recent and decent (though in some respects flawed) book Anger & Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice as well.

I proposed a similar class at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, which would have less focus on religious thinkers and approaches, and focus more on the question about whether anger could be useful or necessary not just for promoting justice, but for action aimed specifically at combatting or remedying injustice. The first several times I proposed it as an upper level Humanities elective, my proposal didn’t get accepted, and I taught other classes instead. Then, this Spring, the chair scheduled me to teach it.

Here are the readings I selected, week by week:

Week 1

• Aeschylus, Eumenides (selections)

Week 2 (no class session due to Martin Luther King Jr. Day)

• Martin Luther King, Unfulfilled Hopes

• Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger

• Ursula K Leguin, On Anger

Week 3

• Euripides, Medea

• Epictetus, Discourses 2.17

Week 4

• Plato, short selections from Euthyphro, Gorgias, Protagoras

• Plato, Republic book 4

Week 5

• Aristotle, Rhetoric book 2 (selections)

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics book 4, and Eudemian Ethics book 3 (selections)

Week 6

• Seneca, On Anger books 1-2

Week 7

• Seneca, On Anger book 3

Week 8

• Plutarch, On Controlling Anger

• Plutarch, On Moral Virtue

Week 9

• Epictetus, Discourses (selections)

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (selections)

Week 10

• Jewish and Christian Scriptural Texts on Anger

• Lactantius, On The Anger of God

Week 11

• John Chryostom, Homilies (selections)

• Augustine of Hippo, selected texts

• John Cassian, Institutes book 8

Week 12

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae, question 46 (selections)

Week 13

• Joseph Butler, Sermons 8-9

• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (selections)

Week 14

• Myisha Cherry, “Love, Anger, And Racial Injustice”

Week 15

• Amia Srinivasan, “The Aptness of Anger”

You’ll notice several things. The first is that there are many potential philosophical, religious, and literary texts relevant to anger that we didn’t include in the class. That’s really just a function of the need to avoid entirely overwhelming students who are taking a 15-week class.

The second is that there’s a sort of thematic and generic structure to the class (something I stressed to the students). Here’s how I intended it to go:

• We start off with some key Greek tragedies that thematize anger, as well as short insightful 20th century selections about anger and justice (week 1-3)

• Then we look at some key philosophical approaches to anger, represented by Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic texts and thinkers (weeks 4-9)

• We shift to religious perspectives, mostly Christian, many of which engage with and reinterpret the philosophical schools within religiously-focused frameworks (weeks 10-13)

• The semester finishes by looking at two recent philosophical perspectives on anger, criticism, and opposing injustice (weeks 14-15)

I suppose that one of the other things people might be curious about is what sort of work students had to do for the course. Part of their grade was based on participation in our weekly course discussions.

They also had multiple-choice quizzes each week over the readings, mainly to make sure that they actually do the readings. I allowed students to retake these quizzes to get better scores.

A more significant part of their grade came from their weekly discussion forums, focused on more complex matters in the readings. Each week, each student had to make an initial post and two substantive responses to classmates in two discussion forums.

Then there were the longer written assignments that were largely focused on students assessing themselves at various points in the semester in terms of their own understanding, approaches, and personal development in relation to anger.

So there you have it, the skeleton of one of the courses I’ve taught several times and hope to keep teaching in the future. I’ll be publishing more of these occasionally as time goes on.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.