Fall 2018
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 001, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Unbelief in Western Thought
Prof. Guillory (English) [Syllabus]
For most of the Western tradition, people have believed in gods or God. Not until the nineteenth century was it socially or intellectually acceptable to express disbelief publicly, as in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s notorious assertion, “God is dead.” Yet the expression of unbelief can be traced to the founding moments of Western philosophy, most famously with the execution of Socrates by the Athenian state for supposedly teaching atheism to his disciples. Beginning with the account of Socrates’ trail in Plato’s Apology, we examine what Nietzsche calls the “shadow” of Western thought, the condition of unbelief. How and why have people come to doubt the existence of God? What kinds of arguments have thinkers made in defense of unbelief? Can human society exist without religious belief? Or is it true, as a character declares in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that “without God, everything is permitted.” Readings from Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bacon, Pascal, Hume, Diderot, Sade, Shelley, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 010, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Autobiography: Versions of the Self
Prof. Paul (Comparative Literature) [Syllabus]
Examines autobiographical writing from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Unlike the classical genres of the tragic, epic, and comic—texts that imagine and invent a people’s sense of a shared past and a culture—autobiography is often a belated attempt to capture a singular life. We explore, among other issues, how the self is constructed through reading and writing, the relationship between memory and identity, the claims of authenticity, the oscillation between inner and public life, and the peculiarities of individual voice. Readings from Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, Nabokov, Soyinka, Said, Satrapi, Hejinian.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 020, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Utopias and Dystopias
Prof. Kotsonis (History/Russian & Slavic Studies) [Syllabus]
Considers how writers and other artists over the past two millennia have imagined perfect and just societies and, more recently, how they imagined perfectly unjust and nightmarish societies and implied what would restore them. Readings: Plato’s Republic, Xenophon’s Anabasis, More’s Utopia, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Wells’ Time Machine, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Sinclair’s The Jungle, Zamiatin’s We, Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984. Films: Starship Troopers, Demolition Man.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 030, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Mixed Constitutions
Prof. Monson (Classics) [Syllabus]
The American constitution is based on a system of checks-and-balances, where executive, judicial, and legislature powers are divided into separate branches of government. Where does this system come from? Had it been tried before? What historical forces could topple it? We examine the historical models that inspired or admonished the framers of the constitution. The concept of the “mixed constitution,” combining aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, goes back to Athens in the fourth century BCE. We trace its evolution from there through the Roman Republic, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the English Civil War, to the American Revolution. The theory of the mixed constitution began as a critique of radical democracy, especially by Plato and Aristotle, but it is better known through the work of Harrington, Montesquieu, and Madison as a form of opposition to monarchical tyranny. Through the ages people with quite different ideological perspectives have engaged with one another’s writings on the mixed constitution to find a solution to a timeless problem: how to balance the competing interests that make up complex societies in order to steer between tyranny and anarchy. This dialogue remains an important part of our intellectual heritage. Reading: Plato’s Statesman, Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero’s Republic and Laws, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, excerpts from Augustine, Bodin, Harrington, The Federalist
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 040, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Democracy, Knowledge, and
Equality
Prof. Schwartzberg (Politics) [Syllabus]
Introduces students to classic works both defending and criticizing democracy, asking how we should characterize equality among democratic citizens, and whether this equality hinders or helps us to produce knowledge and to make wise decisions. Beginning with democracy in ancient Athens and key works of Greek political thought, we move to classics of modern political thought, focusing on questions of representation, deliberation, and expertise, concluding with the implications of these arguments for racial inequality in the United States and the argument for the importance of racial integration as a means both of realizing racial equality and of improving the quality of democratic decision-making. Readings: Aristophanes' Wasps, Plato's Protagoras and Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Rousseau's Second Discourse and Social Contract, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, Anderson’s Imperative of Integration, selections from Mill, Dewey, and Hayek.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 050, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Getting a Life
Prof. Velleman (Philosophy)
[Syllabus]
Every person has a life to live, but what is this thing, “a life”, that every person has? To begin with, it’s just the temporally extended existence of the person, the proverbial three score and ten. But a person’s life is more than that, because it follows a natural progression of life-stages, from childhood to adolescence to middle age to senescence. And it’s even more still, since it is partly the creation of the person living it, who can plan it, evaluate it, anticipate its future, and remember its past. We explore these and other aspects of a person’s life through works of literature and philosophy. What makes you the same person throughout the different stages of your life? How does the passage of time color your perception of life? What makes for a good life? A meaningful life? Should you be grateful for having been born, or dismayed at having to die? Readings: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus,” Cicero’s De Finibus, Lucretius De Rerum Natura, Dickens’ Great Expectations, Tolstoy’s “A Confession” and “Death of Ivan Ilych,” Kertesz’ Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, McCullers’ Member of the Wedding, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 060, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Materialism
Prof. Shaw (English) [Syllabus]
Why is materialism a dirty word? Through what logic has it come to be associated with crass monetary gain and excessive bodily pleasure? When did these associations begin, and why? What other senses of materialism (as a philosophy of the everyday, and as a critical corrective to idealism) lurk underneath these pejorative, immediate associations? How might they be activated? We examine conflicts between Christian idealism and a range of materialist philosophies, including Epicureanism, experimentalism and Marxism. Materialists became infamous for directing their attention at bodies rather than souls, at terrestrial matter rather than divine will, and at the letter rather than the spirit of scripture. We follow their lead and pay close attention to a range of texts and objects, but in doing so we also consider just how various materialisms could be, how their realist correctives operated at different scales and in different contexts: from the atomic to the economic, from the corporeal to the textual. Readings: Lucretius, Vergil’s Georgics, 1 Corinthians, Machiavelli’s Prince, More’s Utopia, selections from Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bacon, Diderot, Wordsworth, Poe, Balzac, Marx, Nietzsche and Whitman.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 070, Texts and Ideas: Topics—The "Other"
Prof. Sunder Rajan (English) [Syllabus]
Variously enigma, responsibility and alter ego of the self, or threat to it, the ‘other’ has been a major preoccupation of Western thought. We ask: Who is regarded as the ‘other’? How is the other known? Why is the other so often regarded negatively, as an object of fear, scorn, loathing, or curiosity? Must knowledge of the other always be a form of colonization, domination and violence, or can it be pursued as disinterested truth? Must self and other necessarily devolve into an ‘us’ and ‘them’? Can the other know/speak itself? We note that in recent times the figure of the other, hitherto silent and effaced, has made claims to speak, indeed to speak back, disrupting the realms of knowledge and the social in radical ways. Thus women, ‘natives’, minorities, ‘deviants’, or subalterns claim to speak as others. We engage questions of identity and representation in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality and species. Examining a range of theoretical and literary texts which have shaped the conceptual frameworks, the meanings, and the uses of the binary structure of ‘self’ and ‘other’ gives us a sense of their centrality to philosophical thought and social attitudes through history. Equally we are alert to developments that signal the slow but steady and progressive deconstruction of this structure. Readings include Pomerance’s Elephant Man, Walcott’s Pantomime, Shelley’s Frankenstein; selections from Shakespeare, Defoe, Hegel, Conrad, Beauvoir, Césaire, Ellison, Fanon, Achebe, Plath, Said, Kincaid.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400 080, Texts and Ideas: Topics—The "System"
Prof. Siskin (English) [Syllabus]
The thing that we all love to blame—the System—will be our guide to the changing shape of knowledge in the West from Galileo to quantum computation. We discover, for example, when systems first became something that could be blamed, for systems have assumed many guises since the word first appeared in English in the early 17th century. Systems have described what we see (the solar system), they run computers (operating systems), and have been made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In all of these different forms, system has shaped our experience of the world by mediating our efforts to understand it. Beginning with Galileo’s sighting of Jupiter’s lunar system, we follow system in and out of its social as well as intellectual incarnations, from Newton’s "system of the world" and the many written systems (e.g., Smith’s Wealth of Nations) that generated the Enlightenment, to the modern disciplines (e.g., your major) that emerged from it, to Darwin’s algorithmic system of survival and our own explosion of new uses for, and kinds of, system—including network, nervous, computing, and communication systems, as well as systems theory, self-organizing systems, and system professionals. Readings cross subjects and genres, from treatises of natural philosophy to novels and verse, to provide a scope adequate to the astonishing range of human explanations.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400, Texts & Ideas: Topics—A Long History of Cybernetics
Prof. Weatherby (German) [Syllabus]
Derived from the Greek word for “steersman,” “cybernetics" was an interdisciplinary movement of engineers and management experts, philosophers and scientists, who developed the hardware and terminology of the digital world we live in today. Its goal was to recast the full range of scientific and philosophical knowledge with the aim of studying and guiding organized systems—animals, machines, social bodies. Its leading figures drew on a long history of mostly Western philosophical and scientific thought, and their work generated and was inspired by a new kind of literature called “science fiction.” This course is an introduction to this discipline and its deep intellectual roots. We will proceed thematically, starting with the key terms “communication” and “control,” and treating such topics as the computer, the system, the animal, intelligence, and emergence. Readings will include early and second-wave cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Ross Ashby, as well as John von Neumann, Heinz von Foerster, and Humberta Maturana and Francisco Varela. We will construe their concerns in terms of a long intellectual history stretching back to Plato, Kant, and Peirce, among others, complementing these readings with science fiction from Isaac Asimov to Octavia Butler, from Samuel R. Delany to Ursula Le Guin to Neal Stephenson.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Justice and Injustice
Prof. Weiler (School of Law) [Syllabus]
Issues of justice and injustice and other normative concerns. Each week pairs a core reading from the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament with another work in the Western tradition to explore a broad range of complex normative issues. Often God will be “on trial”: Was the Deluge genocide? Is Abraham guilty of attempted murder and child abuse? Was Jesus guilty as charged? Was Socrates? The themes are all of relevance to contemporary issues: communal responsibility vs. individual autonomy, ecological crisis, ethics vs. religion, freedom of speech and thought, genocide, rule of law and civil disobedience, the Other, punishment and retribution, religious intolerance, sanctity of human life, sex and gender. Readings include: Aristophanes’ Clouds; Plato’s Apology; Xenophon’s Apology; Sophocles’ Antigone; selections from Hebrew Bible, Christian New Testament, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Luther, Kant, Kierkegaard, Mill, Thoreau, Kafka, Camus.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 400, Texts and Ideas: Topics—Discovery and Recognition in Narrative, Film, and Drama
Prof. Kennedy (Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies) [Syllabus]
Across all cultures, stories are fashioned to withhold information at first, holding our attention through suspense. They then produce disclosures at crucial moments of denouement. This dynamic movement from ignorance to knowledge, which creates meaning, is deemed essential in the Poetics of Aristotle, especially when it takes the form of the the recognition of something previously unknown. It exists in all literatures independently of Aristotle’s prescriptions. This sort of discovery is essential to both high literature and low, across genres, epochs, and artistic media. Tracing an arc from the ancient world to the present day, we then see how the epistemology of modern storytelling, across cultures, disturbs the familiar patterns of clear and comforting revelation associated (often mistakenly, in fact) with classic genres. Reading: Aristotle’s Poetics; Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’ Oedipus; Genesis; Mark, Luke, John; Shakespeare’s King Lear; Arabian Nights; Kalidasa; Recognitions of Shakuntala; Voltaire’s Candide; Dickens’ Great Expectations; Auster’s City of Glass, Mahfouz’ Search; Barnes’ Sense of an Ending, excerpts from The Qur’an. Films: Reed’s Third Man, Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Altman’s Gosford Park, Nolan’s Memento.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 403, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the Enlightenment
Prof. Chazan (Hebrew & Judaic Studies)
[Syllabus]
Focuses on the understanding of knowledge and truth in antiquity and the Enlightenment. Divergent perspectives on knowledge and truth have important implications for society and the individual. They lead to alternative notions of how society should be ordered, who should exercise power in society, the goals of individual endeavor, and the nature of individual fulfillment. Key texts from antiquity and the Enlightenment will be read and analyzed with these issues uppermost in mind. Readings: Genesis, Exodus, Luke, Acts, Galatians; Sophocles' Antigone; Euripides' Bacchae; Plato's Apology and Symposium; Augustine's Confessions; Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration; Lessing's Nathan the Wise.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 403, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the Enlightenment
Prof. Rubenstein (Hebrew & Judaic Studies)
[Syllabus]
Beginning with the collision of the "Judeo-Christian" and Hellenistic traditions and their encounter in the Christian Scriptures and Augustine, we see Enlightenment thinkers grapple with the fusion of these traditions they had inherited, subjecting both to serious criticism and revising them as a new tradition—science and technology—rises to prominence. Reading from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Sophocles, Plato, Augustine, Montesquieu, Pope, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
FALL 2018 CORE-UA 404, Texts and Ideas: Antiquity & the 19th Century
Prof. Renzi (College Core Curriculum)
[Syllabus]
Contemporary moral psychology: where it came from, where it’s brought us, how we might move beyond it. Readings: Book of J; Genesis, Exodus, Isaiah; Matthew, Galatians; Gospel of Mary; Euripides' Medea; Aristophanes' Clouds; Plato's Apology and Republic; Xenophon's Apology; Augustine's Confessions; Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto; Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling; Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality; Freud's "Case of Miss Lucy R." and Civilization and Its Discontents.