2007-8 Humanities Seminar
Seminar Theme: The Human and its Others
In 2007-8, the Humanities Institute faculty seminar will meet weekly to explore the topic: "The Human and its Others." Specific focal points for the seminar will be determined by the interests and research projects of its members, who will collectively produce the schedule of readings, discussions, and presentations. The seminar’s general objectives, however, are: to explore how the idea and category of the human has been understood and constructed—across time, across cultures, and in such intellectual disciplines and cultural practices as philosophy, psychology, religion, science, politics, medicine, technology, and art; to map historical and philosophical continuities and crises of the human (and of such conceptual cognates or corollaries as humanity and the humane); to probe the various binaries in which the human has been defined against such “others” as the animal, the divine, the monstrous, the inhuman, and the machine; and to examine the question of the human in the context of some of the contemporary issues (global warming, stem cell research, assisted suicide, torture, cloning, to name a few) that make it critical.