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Course module: UCHUMPHI34
UCHUMPHI34
Senior Philosophy Seminar: The 'Rational Animal'
Course info
Course codeUCHUMPHI34
EC7.5
Course goals
Students are expected to be able to:
  • discern and critically assess philosophical assumptions about reality at large and the place of human beings within it;
  • analyze and critically discuss primary texts of philosophy with the help of secondary texts;
  • articulate a considered and balanced philosophical view on the topics dealt with in this seminar.
Content
Intended for students with a specific interest in advanced research and an eye towards post-graduate studies in philosophy, the Senior Philosophy Seminar is designed to meet the needs of students who wish to reach a greater depth in philosophical studies. The Seminar relies on the expertise of a rotating variety of teachers at University College. It is organized thematically, and requires students to follow three seminars of five weeks each treating main categories of philosophical investigation, from metaphysics and ontology to epistemology, from aesthetics to ethics, from philosophy of mind to philosophy of language, from religion to science.
 
Topic for Spring 2017: The ‘rational animal’? An alternative ‘History of Reason’

We have all been told that (a) Aristotle defined the human as the rational animal, the living thing that possesses rationality or Reason (hereafter: ‘R/r’). A number of us have also been taught that (b) the beginning of western civilisation and intellectual history is marked by a transition from myth (in Greek, muthos) to R/r (in Greek, logos). These assumptions underpin much of our education at both undergraduate (LA&S) and secondary (grammar school) level. Yet the same assumptions have come under heavy fire from different quarters over the past couple of centuries, from Darwin and Marx through Nietzsche and Freud to a range of late 20th- and early 21st-century sages. The proper understanding, status and value of R/r in relation to e.g. data of physics, economic factors, and emotions and other elements of psychology, is probably more controversial and less clear than ever. One of the hardest problems is perhaps how to reconcile a theory of biological evolution with any status aparte for a rational animal species.
In our seminar we shall
(1) try out a conception of R/r in both its theoretical and its practical applications that steers clear of such cliffs, including within its compass on the one hand roles played by empirical science and technology and on the other hand humans’ irredeemably irrational — animal? — nature;
(2) consider how much of this conception is anticipated in the philosophical tradition from Socrates through Plato, Aristotle, various Sceptics, Kantians and Peirce down to Wittgenstein;
(3) reconsider the connection between R/r as the specific difference of the human species (above, a) and R/r as marking the coming of age of the same species, with its moving from irrational supernaturalism to the rational naturalism often regarded as constituting the western tradition of science and philosophy, and thus from intellectual prehistory to history (above, b); and
(4) consider certain threats that false conceptions of R/r arguably pose to education and to our media culture, politics and public debate.

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