Me, Myself, and I: Exploring Senses of Self from a Multidisciplinary Perspective

Catalog description

Human beings have long puzzled over how precisely to conceptualize and understand what it is we are. Questions about the nature of the self have informed the speculations of philosophy, the soteriologies of religion, the trajectories of self-cultivation in contemplative traditions, and the therapeutics of psychology. Recently, cognitive science and phenomenology have attempted to correlate abstract concepts about the self with lived experience, emphasizing how various senses of self give rise to our self-concepts. Through this course, students will engage with conceptions of self that we often take for granted by studying senses of self from multidisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives.