Phil 340: What is a Human Being?
Prof. Patrick Frierson
My Office hours are 4-5 PM on
Tuesday, 1-3 PM on Wednesday, and by appointment
“The greatest concern of the
human being is to know how to properly fulfill his station in creation and to rightly
understand what one must do in order to be a human being.” (Immanuel
Kant, from a set of handwritten notes written in 1764 in his personal copy of Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime,
Ak. 20:41)
“The field of philosophy .
. . can be reduced to the following questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is the human being? Metaphysics answers the first question,
morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth.
Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as
anthropology.” (from
Kant’s logic lectures, as compiled by his student Jäsche in 1800,
Ak. 9: 25)
Course Description: In
a set of lectures to his students, Kant claimed that all of philosophy could be
reduced to the question, What is the Human Being? This course focuses on that question.
Almost half of the course will be spent exploring Kant’s answer to the
question, which will also provide an opportunity to explore Kant’s philosophy
as a whole. The rest of the course
will look at several contemporary approaches to the problem (including, for
example, existentialism and scientific – especially evolutionary –
accounts of human beings).
Requirements
(Tutorial Option):
- For
the tutorial option, the class will be divided into pairs, and each pair
will meet with me each Wednesday for a 75 minute tutorial meeting. In
addition, we will meet as a whole class most Tuesday nights for a brief
lecture and question period (probably no more than one hour). These
meetings are required.
- Each
week, one student in each pair (the author) will write a paper discussing
issues related to the reading for the day. Although I have provided one or
more questions for each week, the papers can be on any topic related to
the primary reading. You are expected to take secondary sources into
account where they are relevant, and you should, over the course of the
semester, make use of at least four sources not listed on the syllabus.
(For advice on finding these sources, click here.) Your tutorial papers should be
1500-2500 words. Papers must be emailed to me and your tutorial partner no
later than 8 AM on the Monday before the tutorial. (I will read these
papers and give you some written
feedback, but not as much as you might typically expect on papers. Much of
my feedback will be oral, in both my lecture and our tutorial
sessions.)
- The
other student (the commentator) will be responsible for responding to the
written paper. These responses will be given orally during the tutorial meeting.
- The
structure of the tutorial meeting will go as follows: The tutorial will
begin with the author reading her or his paper aloud, followed by the
commentator offering his or her response. We will then have an intensive
discussion of the paper that can (and generally will) expand into a
broader discussion of the material for the day.
- Over
the course of the semester, each student will write 6 papers and prepare 6
responses. At the end of the semester, each student will have the chance
to expand one of their tutorial papers into a longer final essay
(2500-3500 words; this expansion is not required). Final evaluation will be based on
written work (60%), prepared oral responses (20%), and general oral participation
in the tutorial (20%).
Requirements (Seminar
Option):
- Attendance, Reading, and Participation (10%).
You are expected to read and reread the assigned texts for each class with
thoughtfulness and care. Merely passing your eyes over the relevant pages
is not reading. You need to engage with the material, thinking through
passages that you find confusing until you are able to either understand
them or clearly articulate the nature of your confusion. You should
constantly assess how the readings relate to one another and to your own
emerging thoughts about what it means to be a human being. You should
bring this deep understanding of and insightful questions about the texts
to class with you each week, prepared to contribute in substantive ways to
our cooperative class project of coming to a deeper understanding of what
it is to be human. You are required to attend every class and are expected
to participate in a learning community of mutual respect.
- Seminar Paper (20%). For at least
one of our weekly meetings, you will be expected to write a seminar paper
of approximately 2000-4000 words that engages with the material assigned
for the day but also incorporates at least two additional readings you
find on your own. (I strongly recommend using some of the strategies
listed here for finding additional
readings.) Your paper may develop a thesis that answers the assigned
prompt for the day, or you may write on another issue related to the
general theme for the day. You must distribute this paper no later than 5
PM on the Sunday preceding class, in order to give all of us enough time
to read the paper carefully. A seminar paper that is late will
automatically suffer a one grade point drop (from a B to a C, for
instance). If the paper is more than 24 hours late, it will receive an F.
The seminar paper should not be “exploratory,” but rather a
well-reasoned argument that defends a specific and interesting thesis
related to the topic for the day. Because of the expectations for this
seminar paper, you should not wait until the week that it is due to begin
writing it. Although each
week’s reading builds to some extent off of previous weeks, each
week’s reading also stands largely on its own. You should start the reading for
your seminar paper at least three weeks before it is due and have started
writing (at least brainstorming) at least two weeks before the paper is
due.[1]
By 5 PM on the Wednesday before your paper is due, you must turn in (to me)
a draft of your paper, showing how far you have come. (Students who do not
turn in a draft will suffer at least a one grade point drop on their
paper.) I strongly encourage you to meet with me on Wednesday or Thursday
to discuss this draft and ideas for improving the paper.
- Presentation (20%). For at least
one of our weekly meetings, you will be expected to give a presentation.
The primary focus of this presentation should be the seminar paper written
for that week’s meeting. You should very briefly explain what you take to be the central thesis of
that seminar paper and what you take to be the core argument for that
thesis. You should then raise significant objections and/or suggest ways
that the argument of the paper could be fruitfully developed. (You might
also use this opportunity to defend alternative positions that are
neglected or insufficiently treated in the paper.) You should feel free to
connect your comments on the paper with your own interests, but the focus
should be on the arguments and ideas in the seminar paper. Your
introductory comments should not take longer than 10 minutes. In addition,
you should come with specific questions to guide discussion. (This might
include passages from the reading that you want to read closely in the context
of the seminar paper, or passages from the seminar paper that you want to
look at more closely.) Because the oral portion of your presentation will
be brief, I strongly recommend including a handout with your presentation. Your handout might include such
things as: a summary of the thesis and main argument of the seminar paper;
brief bullet points with your central questions, criticisms, extensions,
and observations about the paper; quotes for discussion (from the paper
and/or readings for the day); and/or key questions that you hope we will
discuss as a class.
- Weekly Responses (20%). On weeks that you are neither
writing a paper nor giving a presentation, you are expected to write a
short response to the readings. For each week, I have provided a prompt
for written work, and you may use this to guide your weekly response.
Alternatively, you may simply write up a question about or response to the
readings, the seminar paper, or both. Generally, these responses need be
no longer than 200-400 words. These should be emailed to me no later than
4 PM on the Monday before we discuss the material. Responses will be graded with a
check, check-plus, or check-minus.
Late responses are welcome but will receive a zero. At the end of the semester, I will
drop your lowest score. (That
means you get one “free pass,” but use this with care. I will not generally excuse missed
or late assignments beyond this one, even if you have an official excuse
through the Dean of Students. The point of the free pass is precisely to
provide for such contingencies.)
- Final Paper (30%). At the end of the semester, you
will be required to turn in a substantive research paper of at least 4500
words. This paper should engage with at least some of the material we
discuss in class and at least some additional material beyond what we read
in class. The topic of these papers is open-ended, but I recommend one of
three general approaches: (1) Expansion of seminar paper or weekly
response. You may substantially expand either your seminar paper or one of
your weekly responses, responding to comments raised during our seminar
and/or developing points that you were unable to develop in the original
version. (2) Answering Kant’s Question: “What is a human
being?” You may write a
sweeping paper that lays out a clear and compelling argument for a
well-articulated response to the question of what a human being is.
Because of the scope of the question and the (relative) brevity of the
paper, this will not be an airtight argument, but it should provide a
compelling overarching account of human beings. (3) Scholarly paper on a
specific topic discussed in class. You might focus your final paper on a
specific question or issue that arose in class. Some examples: How does
Kant’s aesthetics relates to his empirical account of pleasure? Does
Kant adequately solve the problem of radical evil? Is Kant’s
treatment of gender consistent with his moral philosophy? Is the use of
“memes” consistent with a strictly materialism conception of
human beings? (How) can Foucault respond to Sartre’s critique
without conceding the primacy of human freedom? Does Heidegger’s
conception of Being-towards-death as one’s ownmost
possibility provide for human freedom or contradict such freedom (or both,
or neither)? For this option, you should clearly articulate a question and
a thesis that answers/addresses that question, and your paper should
clearly and convincingly defend that thesis while responding to the most
important alternatives/objections.
Texts:
- E-reserves
(e-course-packet): List of texts available here, and links to the actual
materials (for Whitman students) available here (email me
for the password if you forget it).
- Miscellaneous
online resources linked below. (Occasionally, readings are available for
open access on the web, in which case I have provided a link to the
relevant website rather than to ereserves.)
- Patrick
Frierson, What
is the Human Being? (rough draft, 2011).
Links under “topic” are to a rough draft of my forthcoming
book.
- Daniel
Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin,
2003, ISBN: 0-14-200384-0)
- Optional:
Christine
Korsgaard, The
Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996,
ISBN: 0-521-55960-X)
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin
Classics, 2006, ISBN: 0-14-303988-1)
Timeline:
In addition to the readings listed under “readings” for
each week, there is an online reading to which one can link by clicking on the
“topic” link.
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Topic
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Readings
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Written Work
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Week One
(January 17)
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What is the Question?
Finish designing
the syllabus (as a class)
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In class handouts
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Give your own best
answer to the question “What is a Human Being?”
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Week Two
(January 24)
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Kant: What Can I Know? (focus on chapter
one, sections I-II)
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Selections
from Critique of Pure Reason
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Briefly summarize Kant’s
answer to the question, What can I know?
Raise at least one important objection to Kant’s answer.
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Week Three
(January 31)
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Kant: What Ought I
Do? (This links to the same reading as last week. For this week, focus on
chapter one, section III.)
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Selections
from Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason
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To what extent does
Kant’s answer to the question “What ought I do?” also
answer the question “What is the human being?”
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Week Four
(February 7)
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Kant: What May I Hope? (This links to the same
reading as last week. Focus on section IV.) You should also read pp. 1-12 of this link.
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Selections
from Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
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Develop and defend
a key problem with Kant’s transcendental anthropology.
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Week Five
(February 14)
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Kant on History and Diversity
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“Idea
for a Universal History,” selections from Critique of Judgment, Observations on the Beautiful and
Sublime, “Determination
of the Concept of a Human Race,”
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Does Kant’s
philosophy of history and human difference make his overall answer to
“What is the Human Being?” better or worse?
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Week Six
(February 21)
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Kant’s Empirical and Pragmatic
Anthropology (Note that there are TWO separate hyperlinks)
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Selections
from Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View
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What is missing
from Kant’s answer to the question, “What is a Human
Being?”
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Week Seven
(February 28)
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Naturalism
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Dennett, Freedom Evolves
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Does evolved
freedom sufficiently capture the range of human freedom? Or,
How might Kant respond to Dennett’s naturalist account of human beings?
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Week Eight
(March 6)
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Historicism and Human Diversity
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Kuhn,
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(selections)
Foucault,
“The Subject and Power” and “On the Genealogy of
Ethics” and
debate with Noam Chomsky (available here.)
Ruth
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, pp.
1-20, 130-172.
Clifford
Geertz, “Anti-Anti-Relativism”
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Briefly lay out the
most serious historicist challenge to Kant and defend the best Kantian
response to that challenge.
Or Is it reasonable to think that
there is a single answer to the question “What is the Human
Being?”
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Week Nine
(March 27)
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Existentialism
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Kierkegaard,
selections from “Subjectivity is Truth”
Heidegger,
selections from Being and Time
Sartre, “Existentialism
is a Humanism” (non-reserve link)
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Is existentialism
the best approach to human freedom? If so, defend it against at least one
objection. If not, what is a better approach (and why)?
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Week Ten
(April 3)
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Normativity
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Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, selections;
MacIntyre, After Virtue, selections;
Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, selections
Korsgaard, selections
from The Sources of Normativity
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If the question
“What is the human being?” is a normative question, what is the
best answer? (You may focus here on one dimension of human life, such as
epistemology or ethics.)
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Week Eleven
(April 9 or 11)
We must move our
class period because of the Undergraduate Conference, unless everyone would
prefer to go ahead and meet on Tuesday.
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Return to
Heidegger, Foucault, and Kant.
Guest speaker, Beatrice Han.
Review Foucault
section of
Historicism and Human Diversity and discussion of Heidegger in Existentialism
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Han, xxx
Heidegger,
selections from Being and Time
Foucault,
“The Subject and Power” and “On the Genealogy of
Ethics”
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Week Twelve
(April 17)
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What is the Human
Being?
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Reread the topic
that got the shortest shrift over the course of the semeseter
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