Climate Ethics
Anthropogenic climate change is the largest challenge facing human civilization. Its physical and temporal scale and unprecedented complexity at minimum require extensions of existing ethical systems, if not new ethical tools. This course will begin by examining natural and social-scientific studies of climate change and its current and predicted effects (e.g. the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern Review). Most of the course will examine how religious and philosophical ethical systems respond to the vast temporal and spatial scales of climate change and its inherent uncertainties. For instance, common principles of environmental ethics such as justice and responsibility are often reimagined in climate ethics. We will also explore the degree to which the assumptions of many modern Western ethical systems including linear causality, an emphasis on individuals, and purely rational decision-making foster or inhibit climate ethics. In the course, we will take a comparative approach to environmental ethics and may examine perspectives from secular Western philosophy, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), Buddhist, and Islamic thought. Course Note: Undergraduates must petition to enroll.
Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics, one of the major types of normative ethics, involves a study of virtues, character, and the formation of such character. This course will examine some of the major contributions to the tradition of virtue ethics (e.g. Aristotle, Aquinas), the late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics (e.g. MacIntyre, comparative studies of virtue across religious and philosophical traditions), and its flourishing in environmental ethics. Course Note: Undergraduates must petition to enroll.
Culture, Mental Health and Psychiatry
While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as
“brain disease,” there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness
vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering frommental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?
Politics and Political Knowledge
Recent developments have led to a renewed interest in the question how to most fruitfully to understand “politics” or “the political.” Is it best understood as a dimension of many practices, a specific set of practices, or is it more advantageous to see it as a specific institutional domain separate from others? What is it’s relationship to violence and/or to the solution of common problems? What is it that enables politics to proceed and under which circumstances is it crowned by success? What in particular is the role of specific kinds of knowledge such as eu/dystopian thinking, sociology, rhetorics, and organizational knowledge in enabling politics? In search for answers we will, armed with core ideas by Hobbes and Rousseau, read texts by Weber, Tilly, Mann, Schmitt, Mouffe, Laclau, Mannheim, Foucault, Taylor, Anderson, Bourdieu, Habermas, and Latour. Limit: 20. Advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor only.
Truth, Half-Truth, and Post-Truth
This course examines the philosophical and ethical issues surrounding lying, truth-telling, and everything in between. Students will put classics of the Indian and Western philosophical traditions into conversation with contemporary analyses of “alternative facts” and postmodern criticisms of absolute truth. Questions to be considered include: Are half-truths just another kind of lie, or stepping-stones to a more complex understanding? Is it even possible to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”? Is it morally permissible to mislead someone for their own good, or for a leader to deceive their citizens? How can we act responsibly when there are two sides to every story?
Being Human
What does it mean to be a human being – a person who fulfills individual capabilities and also contributes to a community’s well-being? What connects the individual and community to an ultimate vision, spirituality, or God? These questions and investigations can be described as an examination of and argument for constructing a theological anthropology. When one thinks intentionally about the being of a human and that human’s ties to some concern or force greater than the limited self, then transcendence and materiality involve themselves in a complex dynamic. How does one construct an individual and a community of individuals? We investigate different models of being human and engage other disciplines to help unpack “being human.” We expand texts from folktales to theory. Course Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll.
Islam, Race, and Decoloniality
This course explores the historical and discursive practices through which the racialization of Muslims and Islamic cultures developed and remains sustained within colonial and neo-colonial contexts, modalities and relations. Particular attention to the “threat of Islam” is examined in various literary, media and ethnographic narratives. This course examines how race is constituted within contemporary imperialist practices, specifically the global war on terror’s focus on constructing Islam and Muslim cultures as uncivilized, inferior, and oppressive. Using a de-colonial framework, the course will engage the politics of pluralism, multivocality and resistance.
Magic and Divination in the Islamic World
From weather forecasts to stock market speculations, our modern world is saturated with predictions for the future. In spite of this, other divinatory methods such as astrology are often portrayed as superstitious, irrational, or unreligious. This course will introduce students to the unexpected interaction of science, magic, and religion through the exploration of divination in the Islamic world. We will ask how divination can be a part of religious practice and how methods of future-telling are said to “work” from the perspective of the philosophers and scientists who practiced them. We will also explore the arguments against divination and identify and understand religious and/or scientific objections to the practice. All readings will be in English translation.
Contagion: Ethics and the Other
This is a graduate seminar which explores the complex ways that epidemic disease has shaped and been shaped by religion, philosophy, literature, and the emerging sciences of modernity. Contagion has long been a central moral problem in theology and philosophy, the organizing terror of all human civilization because of the sudden, stochastic, and terrifying spread of visible, embodied changes. Contagion is our most intimate companion: Plague as punishment, as test, and as a sign of divine judgement have long been a topic of sacred texts, defining how societies thought about, duties, telos, meaning, and salvation. Contagious diseases raise stark ethical choices as well. The uses of quarantine as a defense, the establishment of isolation, and the fear of the stranger mark the historical responses to plagues. In this course, we will consider both the science behind the plagues that have torn across the course of human history, and the sacred and secular textual responses to them. Plagues leave behind cultural artifacts and traces of the puzzle of human behavior in response to epidemics: compliance, resistance imagination, and innovation. We will explore this theme in all its complexity, focusing on the textual and literary responses to the challenge of contagion.
Contemporary Theories of Religion
This course will explore developments in the study of religion from the Marburg Declaration of 1960 to the present. Participants will attend to the recent history of the field, intellectually and institutionally; to the analysis of select theoretical developments in this period, their prospects, accomplishments, and challenges; to the relationships between the History of Religions and work on religion in related fields of study (e.g., anthropology, sociology, history); and to the social location(s) of the study of religion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. PQ: HREL 32900 / AASR 32900 "Classical Theories of Religion". Course Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll.