Autumn
Euripides’ Bacchae: Madness, Contagion, Responsibility, Shame, and Guilt
Outline: We’ll conduct a careful study of one, slightly mutilated, Euripidean tragedy and its intellectual descendants. These descendants include the Byzantine-period mystery-play Khristos paskhōn; Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Ecce Homo; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational; Georges Devereux, “The Psychotherapy Scene in Euripides’s Bacchae”; Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity; some performance history; and translations by Wole Soyinka and Anne Carson. A dual attention to the play and the “essentially contested” character of its readings will lead us deeper into the meanings of the five abstract nouns enumerated in the course title. Familiarity with ancient Greek advisable but not required. Topics to be discussed will include classical reception, translation and appropriation, cultural and religious change, and the ambivalence of moral terms.
Anthropology of Food and Cuisine
Eating is a physiological precondition for the reproduction of human life. Yet while human beings
are omnivores in biological terms, human food intake is neither random, nor based on genetically
encoded taste preferences. Rather, contemporary patterns of food recognition, procurement,
preparation, and consumption are highly differentiated in cultural and social terms, and have long
and complicated histories. It is not just that local and regional cuisines exhibit historically and
culturally contingent preferences for certain foods and food preparations but also that the foods
people consume within a single society can come to symbolize both powerful senses of allegiance
and deep social divisions. Similarly, patterns of food-sharing (or its avoidance) have long
characterized the ways in which people conceptualize, inhabit, express, and delimit their ethnic,
religious, political or even gender identities. What is more, certain foods (e.g. sugar, potatoes, corn,
cocoa, coffee, codfish, or beef) have played a decisive role in processes of European expansion
overseas, the establishment of colonial regimes, and the emergence of what is sometimes called the
“modern capitalist world system”. Since the 19th century, the mechanization of agriculture, new
techniques of conservation and conveyance, and industrial food preparation have, not only driven
processes of global commerce and capital accumulation – and social dislocation; such dynamics
have also significantly impacted the way the world eats today.
Anthropologists have long given attention to human foodways – but up until quite recently,
they have done so in an unsystematic, haphazard fashion. Food has figured prominently in theories
of gift exchange, religious sacrifice, classificatory systems, the analysis of social structure and
symbolic systems, but also political economy, cultural ecology, and applied work in famine-
modeling, food security, and medical anthropology. More recently, food and eating have become the
focus of an anthropology of the body, and have come to figure in attempts to theorize sensuality and
the politics of pleasure and suffering. This course will explore several such themes with a view
towards both the micro- and macro-politics of food. For what historical reason are people eating
what they eat today? What kinds of historical and present power relations underwrite contemporary
dietary patterns in different parts of the world? How does food come to express our identities? Why
are some people starving in the midst of global plenty, and why are others perceiving obesity as a
threat to their collective health? What relations exist between food, race, and gender? And why are
patterns of food-intake (similar to patterns of sexual behavior) so strongly and pervasively tied to
ideas about morality?
By examining a range of case studies and theoretical texts, this course aims to provide the
students not so much with specific answers to such questions than with an ethnographic, historical,
and theoretical basis for an informed and engaged discussion of them. The course takes the format of
a seminar augmented by lectures (during the first few weeks), scheduled video screenings, and
individual student presentations during the rest of the course.
Colonizations 1
This course is the first part of a three-quarter core sequence that explores the centrality of
colonialism to the making of the modern world. Rather than treating contemporary geohistorical
units such as e.g. Europe, Africa, Asia or the Americas as having separate “histories” that have
only recently come to converge through so-called processes of “globalization”, this course places
specific emphasis on a long-time perspective on cross-cultural/societal connections. Readings
and discussions consider the changing dynamics of conquest, enslavement, and colonialism and
their reciprocal relationships to resistance, freedom, and political independence. The first quarter
(Colonization I) takes slavery, colonization, and the making of the Atlantic world as its central
thematic. The second quarter (Colonization II) emphasizes colonization in Asia and the Pacific,
giving special attention to the pre-modern Arab and Chinese empires, European and Japanese
colonialism, and decolonization in Asia. The third quarter (Colonizations III) focuses on
processes of decolonization and the emergence of the so-called Third World.
Narratives of American Religious History
How do we tell the story of religion in America? Is it a story of Protestant dominance? Of religious diversity? Of transnational connections? Of secularization? This course examines how historians have grappled with such questions. We will read the work of scholars who have offered narratives explaining American religious history, including figures like Sydney Ahlstrom, Albert Raboteau, Mark Noll, Ann Braude, Catherine Albanese, and Thomas Tweed. This course will introduce students to key historiographical questions in the study of American religion, as well as to classic texts which have shaped the field’s development.
Judaism, Medicine, and the Body
For centuries the “Jewish doctor” has existed as an archetype, but is there such a thing as Jewish medicine? Does Judaism teach a distinct approach to the body, illness, and healing? And more significantly, why should religion have anything to do with one’s health today? In this course we will grapple with our assumptions regarding modern Western medicine by discussing topics in Jewish medical thought and ethics. We will study how Judaism – its texts, history, laws, and traditions – intersect with issues of science, medicine, and the body. In particular we will think about how a Jewish approach to medicine, and more broadly a religious approach, might complicate contemporary assumptions about the body and healing. We will also consider how Jewish bodies have been imagined and stereotyped, and think about how that might affect Jewish approaches to disease and medical ethics. This course will thus offer students a way to think about alternatives to assumptions about medicine, the body, and ethics in the secular West, which will be explored both in class materials and in personal projects. No prior work in Jewish studies, medical ethics, or religious studies necessary.
Chinese Thought and The Good Life
This course examines the ideas of thinkers with vastly different responses to the question: What is the life well lived? In our study, we will focus on early China (5th century to 221 BCE), a seminal and vibrant period in Chinese thought. Some thinkers (such as “Laozi”) argue the good life is the simple one, others (Xunzi) insist that it is the life of achieved great intellectual, aesthetic, or moral ambition. Yet others argue that central to the life well lived are rich, nuanced, and strong ties to family (Confucius), acting on one’s developed intuitions (Mengzi), or developing one’s capacity to play in the moment whatever the circumstances (Zhuangzi). Two thinkers we will study focus on the means for making the social world supportive of a life that is good. Hanfeizi argues for the importance of well-defined, objective, enforced laws. Sunzi illuminates the art of war. We will explore topics such as notions of the self, conceptions of the greater cosmos, the role of rituals, ideas about human nature, and the tension between tradition and self-expression. The course includes lectures, class discussions, self-designed spiritual exercises, creating a class “Commentary” on the Analects, essays of varied lengths, and writers’ circles.
Hope in Theological, Philosophical, and Political Perspective
What is hope? What role does it play in our lives? What role can it play in our politics? Is it a virtue—theological or otherwise? When is hope problematic? What happens when people lose hope? To address questions like these, this course will consider a wide range of recent work on the topic, from authors including Gabriel Marcel, Josef Pieper, Adrienne Martin, Cheshire Calhoun, Katie Stockdale, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Michael Lamb.
Good Hands: Research Ethics
Basic research is intended to explore and evaluate truth claims at the edge of our understanding of the natural and physical world, and it is this very quality that renders it useful as science. Yet, this often creates significant ethical questions for the research as well as for the social order in which all research takes place. Often, courses in research ethics focus on the establishment and enforcement of canonical rules of behavior, where the goal is to inform the investigator about how to follow these established rules. This course will turn to a different set of problems in research ethics. While we will begin with a foundation in the history of research ethics, reviewing the key cases that shaped the policies about which we have consensus, (human and animal subject protections; authorship, etc.) will consider the problems about which there is not yet a clear ethical course: what are the limits of human mastery? Why is research deception so prevalent? Are there experiments which are impermissible and why? What is the obligation of the researcher toward their community? How can we think clearly and ethically in situations of deep uncertainty? We will consider how moral philosophy as well as theological arguments have shaped research science and reflect on the nature, goal and meaning of basic and translational research in modernity. Course Note: Required course for new MS program in Biological Sciences.
Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge. PQ: Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.
Money and Morality
In this course we will study anthropological perspectives on economic behaviors and the moral ideas that guide them. We will ask how material conditions and specific cultural contexts shape religious and moral attitudes towards the exchange of various things (e.g., human body parts, heirlooms, and commodity goods). This course will be of benefit to students interested in bringing the theoretical tools of economic anthropology to bear on the study of religious practice and ideology, as well as those more broadly interested in critical perspectives on capitalism and social theories of gift and commodity exchange. Students are expected to be adept at reading and applying social theory. PQ: Enrollment by Consent Only. Students must email the professor one to two paragraphs explaining how their academic interests and research relate to the course, and their level of preparedness to read and apply anthropological theory. Course Note: Undergraduates must petition to enroll.
Darwinism & Literature
Scientific and Humanistic Contributions to Knowledge Formation
In this course, we will explore whether the sciences and the humanities can make complementary
contributions to the formation of knowledge, thus leading to the integration and unification of human
knowledge. In the first part of the course we will take a historical approach to the issue; we will discuss
how art and science were considered complementary for much of the 18th and 19th century (for example,
in the views and work of Wolfgang Goethe), how they became separate (‘the two cultures’) in the
middle of the 20th century with the compartmentalization of academic disciplines, and how some
attempts have recently been made at a reunification under the concept of ‘consilience’. In the second
part of the course, we will focus on conceptual issues such as the cognitive value of literature, the role of
ideas in knowledge formation in science and literature, the role of creativity in scientific and literary
production, and how scientific and philosophical ideas have been incorporated into literary fiction in the
genre known as ‘the novel of ideas’. As an example of the latter, we will read the novel ‘One, No One,
and 100,000’ (1926) by Luigi Pirandello and discuss how this author elaborated and articulated a view
of the human persona (including issues of identity and personality) from French philosophers and
psychologists such as Henri Bergson and Alfred Binet.
Science, Governance and the Crisis of Liberalism
In the era of "post-truth" it has become common to link a crisis of scientific authority with a crisis of liberalism. Democracies around the world are under threat, this reasoning goes, in part because of an attack on scientific truth. But what does liberalism - as political culture and as a form of governance - need (or want) from science? Depending where you look, the answer might appear to be facts, truth, a model 'public sphere,' an ethic of objectivity, tactics for managing risk and uncertainty, or technologies of population management (to name a few). In addition to exploring the complex historical relationship between science and liberalism in the modern era, this course will critically assess how the history of science and the history of political thought have theorized truth and governance. We will examine what models of "coproduction" and "social construction" - nearly ubiquitous in the historiography of modern science - fail to capture about the histories of science and state power. We will also think about how political and intellectual historians' theories of truth and mendacity in politics might be enriched by more attention to scientific knowledge in both its technical and epistemological forms. This course focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Europe and the United States in global perspective, and readings will draw from political theory, history, economic thought, the natural and human sciences, and critical theory. Advanced undergraduates are very welcome with instructor's permission. This course fulfills the elective requirement for the MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge
Technologies of the Body
From models and measures to imaging technologies and genomic sequencing, technologies have profoundly shaped how we know and understand human bodies, health, and disease. Drawing on foundational and contemporary science and technology studies scholarship, this class will interrogate technologies of the body: how they are made, the ways in which they have changed understandings of the human condition, their impact on individual and collective identities, and the interests and values built into their very design. Course readings will examine how technologies render bodies knowable and also construct them in particular ways. We will also focus on how technologies incorporate, and reinforce, ideas about human difference. Students will conduct an independent, quarter-long research project analyzing a biomedical technology of their choice. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and explain the social, political and economic factors that shape the design and production of biomedical technologies, as well as the impact of these technologies on biomedicine and the social world more broadly. This course provides students with an opportunity to conduct a quarter-long research project, using a biomedical technology as a case study. Students will be introduced to foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in science and technology studies, and will use this scholarship to conduct their independent research.
Global Environmental Humanities
Hurricanes, heat waves, polar vortexes, wildfires. Climate makes the news these days. As “natural” disasters and extreme weather become more common, problems that scientists have been warning of for a generation are suddenly at the forefront of our imaginations, and perhaps our fears. And yet talking about the environment on a global scale has proven challenging. How do we as political actors, scholars, and citizens begin to understand, let alone respond to, a problem as large and complicated as worldwide climate change? Climate change, it turns out, is not just a climate problem but an everything problem.
Realism: Art or Metaphysics?
Besides its historical role as the first capital-letter avant-garde in painting and literature, Realism is making a return in many current artistic and, for that matter, cultural and journalistic contexts. But whether one examines its entanglement with reputed adversaries like Romanticism and Idealism, its origins in ancient and medieval metaphysics, or its strange side career as a label for amoral pragmatism in political theory and practice, the many-sidedness of realism makes pinning it down quite a challenge. Is there any common thread binding Plato and Courbet, Virginia Woolf and García Marquez, Catherine Opie and Ai Weiwei? Can there be a realism of dreams and desire, such as one might find in Freud? And is realism a revolutionary venture, or a consolidating surveillance of social types? What role do new technologies and forms of spectatorship, from oil painting to photography, the printed book to streaming media, play in its rise and evolution? Readings in art history, fiction, and philosophy will alternate with film screenings and gallery visits. Grad seminar, advanced undergraduates will be admitted by courtesy only Social Thought, to be cross-listed in Art History, Comp Lit, and IFK
Winter
When Cultures Collide: The Multicultural Challenge
Coming to terms with diversity in an increasingly multicultural world has become one of the most pressing public policy projects for liberal democracies in the early 21st century. One way to come to terms with diversity is to try to understand the scope and limits of toleration for variety at different national sites where immigration from foreign lands has complicated the cultural landscape. This seminar examines a series of legal and moral questions about the proper response to norm conflict between mainstream populations and cultural minority groups (including old and new immigrants), with special reference to court cases that have arisen in the recent history of the United States.
Law and Citizenship in Latin America
This course will examine law and citizenship in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will explore the development of Latin American legal systems in both theory and practice, examine the ways in which the operation of these systems has shaped the nature of citizenship in the region, discuss the relationship between legal and other inequalities, and analyze some of the ways in which legal documents and practices have been studied by scholars in order to gain insight into questions of culture, nationalism, family, violence, gender, and race.
More Than Human Ethnography
In this course we explore the growing fields of more-than-human and 'multispecies' ethnography. We will examine theoretical antecedents promoting the inclusion of non-human social actors in ethnographic analysis and read many examples of such work, including foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Kim Tallbear, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and Augustin Fuéntes among many others. We will consider the role other species and 'actants' played in early social science work and contemplate recent studies of "becoming with" other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria-encountering complex ecological kin relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and querying decolonial legacies and the role of ecofeminist thought and queer ecologies in the 'more-than' turn. Multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional methodologies; we will thus couple ethnographic examples with literature by geographers, biologists, and philosophers. The course is a discussion-based seminar, with significant time devoted to understanding the logistical or methodological aspects of 'more than' work-to querying how such studies have been conducted in practice. The final paper in the course will take the form of an exploratory essay (ethnographic, historical, or theoretical) based on data and observations collected during previous weeks.
Introduction to Science Studies
This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists raised original, interesting, and consequential questions about the sciences. Often their work drew on and responded to each other, and, taken together, their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science studies." The course furnishes an initial guide to this field. Students will not only encounter some of its principal concepts, approaches and findings, but will also get a chance to apply science-studies perspectives themselves by performing a fieldwork project. Among the topics we may examine are: the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications; actor-network theories of science; constructivism and the history of science; and efforts to apply science studies approaches beyond the sciences themselves.
Black Social Thought
This course will familiarize students with social science academic and lay intellectual theorists who speak to and about the political, economic, and gender ways of being within the African Diaspora. Most of the course will highlight the voices of Western scholars, pan-African international scholars and thought will be discussed as well.
Conspiracy Theories and the Social Sciences
This course combines readings from the empirical social scientific literature on conspiracy theories with readings dealing with philosophical and conceptual questions of interest to social scientists seeking to understand those who believe them. What kinds of claims count as conspiracy theories? Are conspiracy theories, as a category, epistemically deficient or problematic in some other way? How should social scientists deal with the fact that some conspiracy theories seem true or plausible, while others seem patently ridiculous? We will also give conspiracy theorists a chance to "talk back," reading diverse texts authored by conspiracy theorists themselves, ranging from the satirical to the deadly serious. How can we take conspiracy theorists seriously without overstating the coherence of many of their arguments? And, how can we best respond to the effects of genuinely harmful or prejudicial conspiracy theories in a way that does not uncritically affirm the authority of expertise or close off the possibility of external critique? It is recommended, but not required, that students enrolling in this class have taken one or more courses in the Social Sciences Core.
Bodies, Objects, Cognition
This course explores the differences between objects and embodiment as examined in varied historical periods and artistic genres. We will probe the ontological indeterminacy of embodied beings versus machines in terms of agency, autonomy, subjectivity, and artificiality. Our main operative mode is a visual-verbal comparison and its perception. Through discussions of such visual strategies as pareidolia, abstraction, bodyscape, as well as the scientific phenomena of cloning and humanoid robotics, the course will destabilize once fundamental epistemologies to present a cognitive moment when the traditionally stable object-body dichotomy is understood anew as a dynamic site of affective, biological, representational, and mechanical relations. Visual artists, writers and critics studied will include Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Tadeusz Borowski, Stanislaw Lem, Allan Teger, Magdalena Abakanowicz, W.T.J. Mitchell and others. All readings are in English.
Tolerance and Intolerance in South Asia
Few places in the world are as embroiled in the problem of diversity as South Asia, where sectarian violence-fought mainly along religious lines, but also along caste, gender, and linguistic lines-is at the center of political maneuvering. South Asia offers important lessons in how people manage to live together despite histories of mutual strife and conflict about communities and castes. Focusing on the period of British colonial rule, this class explores different instances and ideologies of toleration and conflict. How were South Asian discourses of toleration by such leaders as Gandhi and Nehru different from their European counterparts (e.g., John Locke and John Rawls)? How did their ideologies differ from those articulated by their minority peers such as Ambedkar, Azad, and Madani? We will analyze constitutive precepts, namely secularism, syncretism, toleration. Our attention here will be on the universal connotations of these ideas and their South Asian expression. Fifth week onward, we will turn our attention to select thinkers: Gandhi, Ambedkar, Azad, Madani. Our focus here will be on the ways that each intellectual negotiated the thorny issues of toleration, difference, ethnicity, and belonging. All the thinkers covered in this class had an active presence in nationalist era politics. Finally, we will read historical accounts of some of the most frequent causes of intolerance, namely cow slaughter, music played before the mosque, and desecration of sacred objects.
Are We Doomed? Confronting the End of the World
We may be at a pivotal point in human history, with civilization facing unprecedented threats including nuclear Armageddon, climate change, and pandemics. This class will explore our potential for self-inflicted catastrophe, as well as approaches for mitigating these perils. We will consider this through readings and engagement with a range of speakers focused on various imminent perils, from the perspective of a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, philosophy, theology, anthropology, statistics, physics, astrophysics, economics, law, business, and the arts.
Making Sense of Lived Experience: In-Depth Interviewing
How do people make sense of everyday experiences of daily life, injustice, crisis,
happiness, success, and suffering? How do researchers understand and connect lived experiences to sociohistorical context? In this undergraduate seminar, students develop qualitative research skills critical to understanding the social world. Social science researchers employ a wide range of research methodologies to learn about the social world, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Qualitative approaches often explore the questions that deepen our understanding of people, institutions, and social processes, attending to questions of meaning and practice. In particular, in-depth interviewing allows for the possibility of learning deeply about people's motivations,
actions, attitudes, feelings, and how they make sense of our lived experiences more generally. This course teaches students how to develop qualitative, humanistic interview-based research studies. Students will learn how to craft inductive research questions, identify and recruit participants, prepare a comprehensive set of interview questions, conduct interviews (and address issues that can arise while interviewing), analyze interview data, consider limitations, and present one's findings. The course culminates in a written interview analysis and presentation using data that gathered for this class. Students will collect primary data, by conducting at least 4-5 interviews for a class project.
The Economy by Other Means: New Approaches to the Economy of the Late and Post-Ottoman Middle East
Questions around political economy and capitalism are once again gaining prominence in Ottoman and Middle East studies. Whereas these questions have been fundamental to the traditional confines of economic history and political economy, this new engagement takes its cue from a different and diverse pool of fields. As one observer recently put it, an emerging body of literature engages with “the economy by other means.” This course takes stock of these still-uncharted means by bringing together and examining a selection of recently published books treating economic themes in the late Ottoman Empire and in the post-Ottoman Middle East up to the mid-twentieth century. How do these books challenge, build on, and/or conform to the contours of economic modes of analysis? What do they contribute to our understanding of capitalism in the Middle East? What are the new archives they create for the study of economic life? How do they destabilize the conceptual repertoire of political economy? More importantly, in what ways do they change our view of the late Ottoman and modern Middle East?
Environmental Justice in Chicago
This course will examine the development of environmental justice theory and practice through social scientific and ethical literature about the subject as well as primary source accounts of environmental injustices. We will focus on environmental justice issues in Chicago including, but not limited to waste disposal, toxic air and water, the Chicago heat wave, and climate change. Particular attention will be paid to environmental racism and the often understudied role of religion in environmental justice theory and practice. Throughout the course we will explore how normative commitments are expressed in different types of literature as well as the basis for normative judgments and the types of authorities authors utilize and claim as they consider environmental justice.
Ways of Knowing
This seminar introduces students to the conditions and processes of knowledge formation that shape our understanding of truth, our theories of social life, and our projections of possible futures. It examines how claims to knowledge emerge out of disciplinary, historical, and political contexts, as well as local cultural factors, both explicit and unspoken: how do institutions, technologies, and other normative structures produce, stabilize, or disrupt knowledge? How do scientists and artists examine and represent the world differently? What makes expertise and why do we trust certain ways of knowing over others? Building upon methods and perspectives in the social sciences and humanistic social sciences, this seminar introduces problems, concepts, and analytical tools that will enable students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to examine how we know what we know. "Ways of Knowing" is a required seminar for all students wishing to undertake the Formation of Knowledge MAPSS track. It also counts towards a required MAPSS Methods seminar.
The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence
With the emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney, the production of computer-generated content has been made accessible to a wide range of users and use cases. Knowledge institutions are particularly challenged to find adequate responses to changing notions of authorship as the mainstreaming of ‘artificial' texts, audio-visual artifacts, and code is transforming our paradigms of communication in real-time. This course offers a survey of scholarship from the nascent field of critical AI studies to investigate the impact of AI, machine learning, and big data on knowledge production, representation, and consumption. In addition to theoretical discussions, we will conduct research-creation experiments aimed at documenting and evaluating emerging methods of AI-augmented content creation across text, image, and sound. Prospective students should demonstrate a substantial interest in media art and design and its connections to digital humanities, critical theory, and pedagogy. Experience with artistic and/or engineering practice is a plus. Permission by instructor. Students must submit a statement of interest (300 words max.) to uhl@uchicago.edu by December 22 in order to be considered for enrollment.
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.
Climate Justice
Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of classical and contemporary theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.
Histories of Women in Science
In the mid-1980s, only two female students drew women when asked what a scientist looked like and none of the male students in the study did. Only 8% of STEM workers in 1970 were women; in 2019 that number was still only 27%. This would seem to suggest that the history of women in science is a recent one. Yet historians of science have foregrounded women’s involvement in fields ranging from early modern medicine to twentieth century astrophysics. This class introduces students to these histories, investigates how and why science came to be a gendered as male, and asks to what extent gendered values continue to inform modern conceptions scientific achievement or value. In so doing, this course also introduces students to feminist science studies and challenges students to reflect upon their own (gendered) experiences of science. Students are strongly encouraged to develop final research projects that draw upon their own interests, scientific expertise, and linguistic competencies.
No prior experience with history is required for this course, although an enthusiasm for history is advised.
Introduction to Philosophy of Science
We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This will involve a discussion of inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including underdetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature. (B) (II)
Spring
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Morality
Poetics of Science
Wonder, Wonders, and Knowing
“In wonder is the beginning of philosophy,” wrote Aristotle; Descartes also thought that those deficient in wonder were also deficient in knowledge. But the relationship between wonder and inquiry has always been an ambivalent one: too much wonder stupefies rather than stimulates investigation, according to Descartes; Aristotle explicitly excluded wonders as objects of inquiry from natural philosophy. Since the sixteenth century, scientists and scholars have both cultivated and repudiated the passion of wonder. On the one hand, marvels (or even just anomalies) threaten to subvert the human and natural orders; on the other, the wonder they ignite fuels inquiry into their causes. Wonder is also a passion tinged with the numinous, and miracles have long stood for the inexplicable in religious contexts. This seminar will explore the long, vexed relationship between wonder, knowledge, and belief in the history of philosophy, science, and religion.
Normal People
We often worry about what’s normal and what’s not. Is my IQ above average? What about my BMI? Should I be feeling this way? Is there a pill for that? People seem to have always been concerned with fitting in, but the way of describing the general run of practices and conditions as “normal” is a rather recent phenomenon; testament to the vast influence modern science have had on how we understand ourselves. Charting a wide-ranging history of the ways that human traits and behaviors came to be classified and measured, this research seminar will introduce students to the theories and techniques used to distinguish the normal from the pathological and the deviant for the past 200 years. We will read Cesare Lombroso on born criminals and Richard von Krafft-Ebing on sexual perversion; learn about psychological tests and developmental milestones; and consider the kinds of people these scientific and medical efforts brought into being. In addition to lecture and class discussions, the course includes close engagement with a diverse historical archive: scientific and medical treatises, clinical case studies, diagnostic tools, and patient narratives. Students will also explore how the University of Chicago contributed to the definition and establishment of normality through a project at the university’s archival collections.
Introduction to Philosophy of Science
We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This involves a discussion of inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including undetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature. (B) (II)
Debate, Dissent, Deviate: Literary Modernities in South Asia
Focusing on the period of British colonial rule, this class explores different instances of toleration and conflict. How were South Asian discourses of toleration by suhc leaders as Gandhi and Nehru differnt from their European counterparts (e.g., John Locke and John Rawls)? How did their ideologies differ from those articulated by their minority peers such as Ambedkar, Azad, and Madani?
Italian Renaissance: Petrarch, Machiavelli, And the Wars of Popes and Kings
Florence, Rome, and the Italian city-states in the age of plagues and cathedrals, Dante and Machiavelli, Medici and Borgia (1250-1600), with a focus on literature, philosophy, primary sources, the revival of antiquity, and the papacy's entanglement with pan-European politics. We will examine humanism, patronage, politics, corruptionassassination, feuds, art, music, magic censorship, education, science, heresy, and the roots of the Reformation. Writing assignments focus on higher level writing skills, with a creative writing component linked to our in-class live-action-role-played (LARP) reenactmnet of a Reinassance papal election. This is a Department of History Gateway course. First-year students and non-History majors welcome.
Science, Culture, and Society in Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 1867-1934
Fin de siècle Vienna is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto Wagner, among other pioneering modernist artists, but it was also home to several of the most important philosophers and scientists of the early twentieth century, including Ernst Mach, Ludwig Boltzmann, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Indeed, the city’s artists drew considerable inspiration from its philosophers and scientists and vice versa. The purpose of this course is to examine these cultural entanglements in more detail, and to analyze why Vienna was integral to the development of so many of the aesthetic and intellectual trends that scholars now associate with “modernity.”
Counterhistories of Mathematics and Astronomy
Mathematics and astronomy are often taught as packaged universal truths, independent of time and context. Their history is assumed to be one of revelations and discoveries, beginning with the Greeks and reaching final maturity in modern Europe. This narrative has been roundly critiqued for decades, but the work of rewriting these histories has only just begun. This course is designed to familiarize students with a growing literature on the history of mathematics and astronomy in regions which now make up the global south. It is structured as a loosely chronological patchwork of counterexamples to colonial histories of mathematics and astronomy. Thematic questions include: How were mathematical and astronomical knowledge conjoined? How were they embedded in political contexts, cultural practices, and forms of labor? How did European scientific modernity compose itself out of the knowledges of others? Where necessary, we will engage with older historiographies of mathematics and astronomy, but for the most part we will move beyond them. No mathematics more advanced than highschool geometry and algebra will be assumed. However, those with more mathematical preparation may find the course especially useful.
The Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence
This course traces the emergence of AI ethics in public policy, examining the power dynamics and political strategies involved in building consensus within a highly dynamic discourse. Students will engage in detailed analysis of AI policy documents and delve into emerging key principles such as fairness, accountability, and transparency, exploring their origins and practical applications. The curriculum centers on a series of case studies that will challenge students to debate over the responsible use of AI systems in real-world contexts, ranging from issues of human rights to sustainable development and geopolitics. Through hands-on analytical and rhetorical exercises, this course is designed as a transformative leadership bootcamp for the rapidly evolving field of AI governance.
Sense & Sensibility & Science @Uchicago: Scientific Thinking in a Democracy
In Sense & Sensibility & Science, you will learn how to better incorporate into your thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques of science at its best. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for solving problems in your own day-to-day life and in a democracy. Yet, as individuals, as groups, as whole societies we fail to take full advantage of these methods. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.
The undergraduate course will be simultaneously taught at UC Berkeley, Harvard and UChicago in spring 2024, with an opportunity for students from all three courses to participate remotely in the same deliberative polling capstone experience. UChicago’s spring 2024 course premiere builds on a decade of experience developing and teaching the popular course at Berkeley and Harvard’s adoption of its own version in 2021.
Man, Society, and Culture in Europe, 1700-1914
What makes us human? What is society and how do societies evolve? What is culture and how do we study it? These kinds of questions spurred the development of disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, and Linguistics to History, Psychology, and Religious Studies today. But in the period from the Enlightenment to the First World War, they were part of an emerging complex of entangled human sciences, which endeavored to answer questions about humanity, its origins, its nature, and its development. Moving from the Scottish Highlands and French Salons to German Universities and British India, this course takes a transnational and transdisciplinary approach that investigates how the answers to these questions changed over time. Students will also examine how distinct modes of scholarship and different knowledge making practices grew out of specific socio-political contexts and trace the development of concepts such as “progress,” “civilization,” “modernity,” and even “science” itself. In so doing, this course not only asks students to question what it means to belong to, or work within, a discipline but also to reflect on the ways in which our modern taxonomy of knowledge dictates what it is possible to know.
The Bible in U.S. Politics: The Use and Abuse of Sacred Texts in the Public Sphere
People across the political spectrum continue to cite the Bible to justify their viewpoints. Black Lives Matter protestors carried signs citing scriptural support for the rights of African Americans to life and justice, while some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th first marched around their state capitols in recreation of biblical Israel’s circling of the doomed city Jericho. How can the same book serve the political ends of such ideologically distinct movements? In this course, we will explore the variety of ways in which the Bible, especially the Christian New Testament, informs contemporary political discourse. We will discuss what the Bible is and where it comes from, and how an interpreter’s social location and culturally and historical-bound assumptions shape their interpretation. We will build upon this foundation by examining several contentious political issues in which the Bible is commonly invoked, including abortion, sexuality, immigration, and gun rights. We will analyze the key passages used by supporters of various policy positions to support their claims, situating these texts in their original contexts and highlighting the historical distance that problematizes their use today. Prior familiarity with biblical literature is not required.
Magic, Miracles, and Medicine: Healthcare in the Bible and the Ancient World
This course examines the complex issues surrounding the body, disability, and medical care in antiquity. It will be guided by a variety of questions, such as what was the root cause of bodily infirmity and disease in antiquity? How did cultural views of sex, gender, and race influence perceptions of the body and what it meant to be able bodied? Such questions are significant when considering what kind of access to healthcare marginalized groups had. In order to explore these questions, we will examine ancient Mediterranean views of medical care through material remains (e.g., magical amulets and healing shrines) and textual evidence (e.g., Galen and Hippocrates). After considering this wider cultural context, we will examine treatments in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and early Christianity. We will also explore how Christian concepts of medical care evolved in light of accounts of Jesus as a divine healer. In addition to this ancient evidence, we will engage with modern disability studies and sociological analyses to better orient our readings. At the end of the course, students will be better acquainted with the complex relationship between religion and medicine and how that affects modern healthcare decisions.
Islamic Education in West Africa
This course will critically explore the history of Islamic scholarship and the transmission of religious knowledge and scholarly authority in West African Muslim societies from the late medieval period to the present day. We will examine a variety of knowledge traditions, textual and pedagogical approaches, epistemologies, and embodied practices of Muslim scholars and students of the region in order to understand what it means to seek, transmit, and create knowledge in the context of West African Muslim societies. In addition to relevant secondary literature, we will read passages from some of the texts taught in these places. Intermediate Arabic is recommended, but not required for this course.
Religion and Psychoanalysis
Freud postulated that many cultural activities with no apparent connection to sexuality, including religious practice and belief, have their origin in the sexual instincts. Sublimation, which describes the process by which the sexual instincts are diverted to nonsexual aims or objects, plays a crucial role in Freudian metapsychology. And yet Freud never managed to articulate a coherent account of this process, and thus he failed to provide a concept of sublimation as such. In this class we will study the role of sublimation in Freudian metapsychology with specific reference to the theme of religiosity. In examining how sublimation is taken up by others (e.g. Klein, Lacan) we will also consider whether this concept affords a novel understanding of religion. Course Note: Undergraduates must petition to enroll.
Philosophical Approaches to Peace of Mind: The Zhuangzi in Dialogue
Philosophical activity across cultures and times has been closely associated with the management of affective states. One common goal is to minimize negative emotions by changing how events are interpreted and appraised. This course will focus on three strategies that appear across different traditions. The first argues that events are outside of our control, in some cases appealing to fate but in other cases appealing to chance. The second strategy is a skeptical approach that attacks our ability to judge any event as bad or good. The third strategy undermines the ontological status of the kinds of things we become attached to, either by rejecting the ultimate reality of individual substances or arguing that diverse things form a single whole. All of these strategies appear prominently in the classical Chinese text the Zhuangzi. The core of this course will consist of a close reading of parts of the Zhuangzi, considering these strategies as they intersect with and shed light on its various philosophies. We will also read in a comparative context. The other traditions used will be guided by student interest, but the most likely choices would be Stoicism and Epicureanism (for the first strategy), Sextus Empiricus (for the second), and arguments appearing South Asian Buddhist philosophies (for the third). Aside from better understanding the Zhuangzi, the goal of the course is to consider how similar strategies function in significantly different cultural contexts.
Religion, Science, Naturalism: Is There a Problem?
The idea that “religion” and “science” are basically at odds with one another — that they involve, indeed, essentially different kinds of rationality — is surely foremost among the ideas that arguably distinguish modernity. This class will consider some of the various ways in which that conclusion has been resisted by some twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers, drawing on a range of philosophical and religious perspectives — those, for example, of the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who would complicate our understanding of what it means to “believe” anything); the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (whose method precisely distinguished existential questions from scientific ones); and the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (who thinks it imperative that the limits of scientific understanding be acknowledged in light of a Buddhist critique). Particular attention will be given to early writings from American pragmatist philosopher-scientists (William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey), who argued that it is a mistake in the first place to think religion necessarily concerns anything “supernatural”; religion, for these thinkers, can therefore be understood as wholly consistent with naturalism.
Art and Description in Antiquity and Byzantium
This course explores the rich tradition of ekphrasis in Greco-Roman antiquity and Byzantium – as it ranges from vivid description in general to a specific engagement with works of art. While the prime focus will remain on texts from Greece, Rome and Byzantium – in order to establish what might be called the ancestry of a genre in the European tradition and especially its fascinating place between pagan polytheistic and Christian writing -- there will be opportunity in the final paper to range beyond this into questions of comparative literature, art (history) writing and ekphrasis in other periods or contexts, depending on students’ interests and needs. A reading knowledge of Greek in particular could not be described as a disadvantage, but the course can be taken without knowing the ancient languages. The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter. PQ: The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule.
Image, Iconoclasm, Animation
This course will explore the fantasies of the animation of images both ancient and early Christian, both secular and sacred, as the backdrop to examining the phenomenon of iconoclasm as an assault on the image from pre-Christian antiquity via Byzantium to the Protestant Reformation. It will tackle both texts and images, the archaeological context of image-assault and the conceptual (indeed theological) contexts within which such assault was both justified and condemned. These historical issues cannot be separated, in our scholarly approaches and responses, from a vibrant contemporary culture around question of virtuality, animation, image-worship and image-destruction in the current world. The course will provide space to reflect on the problems raised by this. The course will be taught over the first four and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule. It will be examined on the basis of a paper, due on a subject to be agreed and on a date to be agreed at the end of the Spring quarter. PQ: The course will be taught over the first 4 and a half weeks in the Spring Quarter on an intensive schedule.
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.