U.S. Intellectual History

Catalog description

This course explores U.S. thought from the Founding era to the present, with special emphasis on how U.S. thinkers, at different points in time, have reflected on what it means to be human. Topics include: enlightenment-era debates about the moral sense and what it means for “all men” to be “created equal”; the intellectual history of slavery and the extent to which enslaved laborers qualified as human; debates about Darwinian evolution and what distinguishes humans from other living beings ; debates about feminism and whether women and men are equally human; Native American conceptions of humanity; debates about reproductive rights and when human life begins; tensions between universalism (as in universal human rights) and cultural particularism; debates sparked by environmentalism; debates sparked by advances in artificial intelligence; conceptions of human identity in an imagined cosmos containing other advanced life forms; and competing claims to authority over what it means to be human made by organized religions, legal system, academic disciplines, and the like, each of which has enjoyed different degrees of cultural authority at different points in time. Satisfies History major and minor requirement. Satisfies Historical Thought requirement.