What Does It Mean to be Human?

Catalog description

What are the past, present, and future of our humanity? This course blends forms of inquiry drawn from philosophy, literature, anthropology, biology, and psychology to ask what our humanity has looked like, what it might mean to us now, and what it might become. Is humanity a biological fact, a socially and historically determined experience, a technological platform, a form of behavior, a reflective self-definition, a political claim, some combination of these, or none of them? Reflectively engaging primary source material in the form of theoretical texts, films, scifi novels, etc., this course aims not to define our shared humanity to but turn it into a question for us.