Comparative (and connected) exploration of philosophies of the body and questions of power. In the west, we have inherited a model of the body as object, opposite to the mind - reinforced by a variety of everyday discourses including medical and health discourses as well as those around beauty, capability, and culpability. This course historicizes continental European theories of mind-body duality, and dives into several global traditions – embodied as well as textual – which offer different models for the thinking-feeling-subjective body. By addressing bodies (in motion), perception/cognition, and epistemology we ask the following: 1) How are our bodies navigating but also subverting or intervening in multiple matrices of power dynamics or knowledge systems through the ways in which we move through the world and 2) what radical possibilities open in the process. Ultimately, these various approaches force us to question what it means to even talk about “a body”. (Meets the Critical Learning: AIM requirement.) (Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.) 1 unit - Sriram.

Across diverse cultures and historical epochs, individuals have asserted a profound 'mystical' connection to reality. In this context, mystics claim an intimate familiarity with an alternative reality or profess the ability to discern reality from mere appearance. This course focuses on exploring a broad spectrum of mystics, extending from Classical to late ancient Greeks, early to medieval Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Additionally, we will engage with contemporary mystics associated with these traditions, emphasizing that mysticism is not confined to the past. 1 unit - Wright.

How has psychoanalysis revolutionized our understanding of human beings, and how can it be fundamental in helping us live more authentic lives? This course will give students a background in some of the major psychoanalytic thinkers, including Freud, Winnicott, Kohut and Jung. We will think about these thinkers in dialogue with various philosophers, such as Rousseau, Nietzsche and Marcuse, among others. For all of these thinkers, we will look at the different ways in which they conceptualize the barriers to living a free, creative life, and what they think it is to flourish as a human being.

In this course, we will read Psychoanalytic perspectives on the self and society to discern how the outside world and the internal workings of the human psyche shape one another. We will trace developments within the field of social psychoanalysis, and think about how these theories can shed light on current social phenomena. We will read texts by social psychoanalytic thinkers like Freud, Bion, Ferenczi, Benjamin, and Fanon, among others.

This course interrogates anthropocentrism and human/nonhuman animal relations through a specialized, eceocritical and ecofeminist analysis of theoretical, visual and literary texts. This program will visit the Andean highlands as well as the Galapagos archipelago.

An examination of critical questions philosophers raise about religious claims and a consideration of how religious thinkers respond to those questions. Topics of discussion include religious experience, arguments for God, the problem of evil, and ideas of immortality.

An introduction to the depth psychology of C.G. Jung, including his notions of the structure of the personal and collective unconscious, the function of archetypes and dreams in development and healing, and the transcendent function as it relates to the individuation process. Contemporary advances in Jungian work in such areas as ecopsychology, soul psychology and Jungian feminist thought will also be considered.

This course takes as its starting point the reality that the world we inhabit is fundamentally marked by violence. Our object of analyses are those philosophical traditions that have sought to make sense of this reality. What does it mean that violence can be described as “legitimate” or “illegitimate”, and how are these decisions made? What is the relationship between violence and the modern state? How do the historical violences of colonialism, indigenous genocide, and chattel slavery persist in the present? What are the connections between civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, and revolutionary violence? Is politics really, simply, violence by other means? Over the course of the Block, we will examine a range of seminal 20th century social and political writings that have approached these questions from a diverse array of philosophical traditions and methods, including those of Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as others that expand on the nature of violence in its contemporary manifestations. The aim of this course is to explore a plurality of robust analytic frameworks by which we might more holistically think through the multiple modalities of violence that define our present.

This course interrogates anthropocentrism and human/nonhuman animal relations through a specialized, ecocritical and ecofeminist analysis of theoretical, visual and literary texts. In many European and Judeo-Christian representations, the nonhuman animal is subjected to the human, and represented as the carrier of a 'value' or 'message' applicable to the human world. In such cultural texts and artifacts, nonhuman animals tend to not be seen, represented, understood as equals, and/or as members of a completely difference species holding value per se, having abilities and skills not directly exploitable in the anthropocentric world. Recent theory has instead voiced the importance of including analyses of the nonhuman vis-à-vis existing analyses questioning colonialism and exploitations based on religion, gender, race, political ideas. Based on these theoretical readings, we will ask: Which discriminatory mechanisms, which power structures apply, similarly or even identically, to nonhumans and to minority, colonized, discriminated groups? How in turn have some minority groups (such as indigenous people) have fought to include land and animal rights in their own battle for full recognition as equal political subjects? We will work actively as a group and individually to identify the cultural discourses enabling domination and exploitation of nonhuman animals, along other subtler instances of anthropocentrism and speciesism. We will then try to leave behind our anthropocentrism and to come up with creative solutions for a more just interspecies world.