350:508

Index # - 72867

Distribution Requirement:  B

Thursday – 1:10 p.m.

CCA - 8 Bishop Place

Henry Turner

The Meaning of Life:  Determining the Human and Beyond

This course examines how the notion of “life” has been determined within the Western philosophical and literary tradition, with a particular focus on the concept of the “human” and its distribution across six major analytic categories: reason, pleasure, action, death, animal, and machine.  We will use these broad categories as nodes or gathering points for a series of texts that have submitted the notion of “life” to radical questioning; our purpose will be to scrutinize as severely as possible the several fundamentalisms that emerge in and through these texts and that have come to constitute the core stakes of the philosophical determination of the notion of life, using our reading and discussion to venture new articulations of the human and its limits.  The reading load will be heavy and will include selections from major philosophical and theoretical authors as well as assorted novels, poems, and short stories.  A course for beginning or advanced students, since we will range from fundamental problems to esoteric digressions.  Requirements include perfect attendance at seminar, regular and vigorous contribution to discussion, email contributions and / or question prompts, final seminar paper.