Ethics and Politics of Intelligibility and Otherness

Catalog description

This course will explore philosophical and religious ideas about intelligibility and otherness, with a close eye to how these ideas have significant value for identifying, understanding, and addressing how we relate to and engage with others – especially “others” not like “us” – in modern democratic societies. Toward these ends, the course will address several interconnected questions. Are we intelligible to each other, despite profound differences of belief, practice, identity, and experience? Or do these deeply ingrained differences engender a radical unintelligibility between persons and between persons and nature? How our views about the intelligibility and otherness of other persons and of nature impact the way we construe ethical and political dialogue, contestation, conflict, and change? How can philosophical and religious ideas, traditions, and practices aid in cultivating mutual intelligibility across difference? What is the relation between intelligibility, otherness, and power?