Curiosity: Ancient and Modern Thinking about Thinking

Catalog description

This course will examine two approaches to the still unanswered question of what happens when we humans come up with new knowledge. How should we describe the impulse, or set of impulses, that leads us to seek it? What is happening when we achieve it? And how do we describe the new state in which we find ourselves after we have it? We will study the work of contemporary physicists and cognitive scientists on these questions along side the approaches developed by the two most powerful thinkers from antiquity on the topic, Plato and Aristotle.