Nature of Persons.

Catalog description

Starting with P.F. Strawson's seminal work on the reactive attitudes, this course explores what it means to be a created person by working through various interpretations and crucial questions concerning our reactive attitudes (e.g., Is distinctively human life possible without these attitudes? Should we quench our retributive attitudes?), which prompts us to follow Harry Frankfurt in posing questions about the structure of created personhood, and then leads us to conclude the course with questions from Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty about the world of persons. Additional readings from, e.g., Gary Watson, Nietzsche, Rawls, Dennett, and Camus.