The specific availability for this course is not currently known. If you would like to know if this course will be offered during your session, please contact us.
This course is a historical survey which examines the roots, limits and ends of the humanist tradition with particular attention paid to what has historically taken the place of the ‘inhuman’, namely the divine, the barbaric, the machinic, the alien and the monstrous. To introduce the contemporary stakes of the debate over humanism, the course will start out with Susan Sontag’s essay on the Abu Ghraib torture photographs “Regarding the Pain of Others”. It will then return to the emergence of the figure of the individual in contrast to the Gods in Euripides’ Bacchae. It will progress through the Christian positioning of the human in relation to God through extracts from Augustine’s Confessions. A series of classes will be spent on the birth of renaissance humanism, concentrating on extracts from Erasmus and Montaigne. The remainder of the course will be spent studying modern texts that limit the figure of the human by identifying that which is inhuman: we will read extracts from Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human, Freud on the unconscious in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, and Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. The course is framed as a class in ethics and moral philosophy insofar as the human is understood to be a normative ideal which guides political and social practices, for example in both the rationalization of European colonialism and in its critique. The guiding questions for the course are what has replaced the divine in the positioning of the human and what threatens to undermine the project of humanism.
Download course description here in Acrobat PDF Format Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to download this file
