First-Year Writing Seminar: Writing About Ethics

Catalog description

What is the right thing to do? How should we act in the world? How do we know? This writing seminar engages critically with the answers that Western philosophy has given to these questions (which philosophy calls “ethics” and “epistemology”) and considers what these answers have neglected or left out. We will inquire into how philosophers, in their approaches to the study of gender and race, teach us how to think about our knowledge of the world and the ways in which we are affected by other people. We will ask how ideas of gender and race have shaped philosophical thought and how they shape our knowledge of our own bodies and the bodies of others. We will read works by Plato, Aristotle, Martha C. Nussbaum, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Audre Lorde, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and George Yancy. Students will write and workshop a variety of essays that critically and creatively engage with the topic of the course.