On Paying Attention: Focus in a World of Distractions

Catalog description

The Core Transformation course is intended to help students focus on applying the knowledge and self-understanding developed while at Le Moyne to the world beyond college; to prepare Le Moyne graduates to be transformed in their thinking through their core studies for a world transformed by contemporary social, scientific, artistic, and technological ways of understanding and being in the world. This section of Transformations is focused on the contemporary problem of distraction or inattention. Though this an age-old problem - Augustine complained of being "scattered in time" in the fifth century--in the age of smartphones and Facebook, the competing claims made on our attention seem only to be multiplying. This course is an opportunity to think about and to enact certain practices of attentiveness and concentration, drawing from religious, literary, artistic, philosophical, sociological, and anthropological sources. We'll be trying various kinds of exercises--from reading poems and looking at paintings to taking walks and cooking meals-- as we read about the ways in which our senses reach out to the world, and as we think together about how even technology may be used in more attentive ways.