Human Nature Seminar: Love and Death:
Love and Death define the human condition as, perhaps, no other pair of concepts can. What is this thing called love and how is it a response to what Camus calls the cruel mathematics of human mortality? This course examines the basic problems of philosophy by looking at human nature and how it fits into nature as a whole. It attempts to answer the questions 'What am I?', 'What am I doing here?', and 'How do I fit in?'. We concentrate on the problem of how our subjective view of ourselves (how it feels to be us from the inside) fits into our objective conception of the universe, as viewed from the outside. In particular, we will be interested in how philosophic theories concerning humanity and nature arose from the tension between the objective and subjective viewpoints, the struggle between love and death.Rooted in the Benedictine vow that encourages faithfulness to a way of life within community, Conversatio is the foundational shared learning experience for every Saint Anselm student. HU 104 is the second semester of a year-long interdisciplinary course that provides students with an intellectual orientation to studies in the Liberal Arts and acquaints them with the distinctive value of those studies within the Catholic Benedictine tradition. The second semester of Conversatio builds upon the intellectual work that students have accomplished during the first semester, where they contemplated who we are as individuals, what our responsibility is within a community, and what our relationship is with the divine. In this second semester students are asked to consider three additional foundational areas of study central to the Liberal Arts: 1) Politics, rhetoric, and the emergence of democracy in human history; 2) The nature of science and the role of scientific understanding in our world; 3) The nature of beauty and the place of art in the lives of individuals and communities. As the common academic conversation orienting students to Saint Anselm College, Conversatio invites individuals to discover their intellectual place and voice within the Saint Anselm learning community by encouraging them to read critically, to contemplate significant questions about human existence, and to communicate their ideas to others with greater effectiveness and respect.
- The Modern period in Philosophy runs roughly from 1600 to 1800. It is defined by the attempt to come to terms with the intellectual implications of the Scientific Revolution. There has long been a standard canon (or accepted body of significant work) for this period that includes seven philosophers arranged into three groups: Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza (The Rationalists); Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (The Empiricists); and Kant (who is generally thought to have combined the best insights of the other two groups). This course is a study of the thought, mainly on metaphysical and epistemological issues, of these philosophers.
The course centers on two main problems: (1) How is knowledge of the external world possible? And (2) What is the place of humans in the new view of the universe revealed by science? The Modern period covers the first attempts to solve these problems following the scientific revolution. It moves from the massive confidence of the first scientists in our ability to solve these problems to the skepticism of Hume and Kant. The aim of the course is to give you an understanding of the intellectual foundations of the Modern world, as well as the beginnings of the Post-Modern world in the failures of the Modern project.
The course aims to be both a history of ideas and a philosophy course. Hence, you will not only have to master the ideas of these thinkers, but also evaluate them for yourselves.
- David Banach's Calendar
| Designed By MoodleThemes |  |
|
You are not logged in. (Login)
|