This course will primarily focus on a close reading of Apuleius' The Golden Ass, a work whose stories within stories have produced many echoes, comic and tragic, verifiable and unverifiable, across the history of philosophy and literature. Self-knowledge might be a romance; life and death a shapeshifting. The spell that fiction casts attempts to suspend us between the two. Philosophy, on the other hand, seems to be equally capable of appearing as a ghostbuster and a sorcerer. The overarching theme of our study will be the potentially transformative power of thinking, alongside its sundry consequences: metamorphosis, delusion, exile. What do we turn into or away from when we turn inward? Reading will also include Apuleius' Apology, in which he defends himself against accusations of magic; Plato's Apology, Plato's Symposium, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.