The Examined Society, a student reading club at ISET led by Resident Faculty Member Lasha Chochua, has held its first meeting. Over more than 34 sessions throughout the academic year, participants will explore fundamental questions at the intersection of economics, political philosophy, ethics, and epistemology: how markets enable millions of strangers to coordinate, what individuals owe one another, what makes a state just, and how we distinguish knowledge from error.
The reading group brings together the works of influential thinkers, including David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Amartya Sen, and Elinor Ostrom, among others. Rather than presenting any thinker as an unquestionable authority, the program invites students to engage with competing ideas, follow debates across intellectual traditions, and develop their own reasoned perspectives through critical reading and discussion.
The full syllabus, including the reading list and topics covered throughout the year, is available here.
