Syllabus
Week I: General Introduction, Discussion on the question, “What is humanitas?”
Week II: Chalmers, “Consciousness and Its Place in Nature,” in Philosophy of Mind, pp. 247 - 272.
Week III: Aristotle, Excerpts from Nicomachean Ethics in Readings in Ancient Greek
Philosophy. (Guest lecture by Tatia Bassileos).
Week IV: Cicero, “Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4, Book 4,” in Cicero on the Emotions, pp. 42 - 70.
Week V: Hume, “Book II: Of the Passions, §3: Of the influencing motives of the will,” pp. 265 - 268, and “Book III: Of Morals, Part 1: Of virtue and vice in general,” pp. 293- 306, in A Treatise of Human Nature.
Week VI: Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section I: Transition from common rational to philosophic moral cognition,” in Practical Philosophy, pp. 49 - 60.
Week VII: Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle, §1-3,” in The Penguin Freud Reader, pp. 214
- 239.
Week VIII: Heidegger, “A. The Existential Constitution of the ‘There’, §29. Being there as Stateof-mind,” in Being and Time, pp- 172 - 179.
Week IX: Ayer, “Critique of Ethics and Theology,” in Language, Truth, and Logic, pp. 104 - 117.
Week X: Held, “The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory,” in The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, pp. 9 - 28.
Week XI: Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to
Moral Judgment.”
Week XII: Dreyfus, “Misrepresenting Human Intelligence,” in Artificial Intelligence: The Case
Against, pp. 41 - 54.
Annotation
What does it mean to be a human being? Throughout history, philosophers and scientists have puzzled over this question, offering taxonomies that took account of everything from physicobiological composition, mental faculties like reason, phenomenal experiences including selfawareness, language, emotion, sociality, and much more. This course aims to explore fundamental features of humanity through an interdisciplinary lens. What is consciousness?
What is an appropriate model of thinking? What is the significance of moods and feelings? How should we navigate the dynamic between rationality and emotion? What ethical import does our conception of ourselves have? These questions and more will be illuminated through an exposition and deep analysis of historical literary texts and contemporary scientific insights.