This course introduces students to basic questions about 1) how our bodies are subject to multiple kinds of power dynamics 2) the ways in which we move through the world in these bodies navigate, subvert, reinforce, and interfere in these dynamics and 3) what radical change/possibilities may be through physical intervention. We will examine these questions through attention to the spheres of experimental and social performance, sports, everyday activity/interpersonal exchange, and protest movements. We will read theorists from disciplines including history of power and knowledge; dance and performance studies; postcolonial studies/critical theory; and more. This course will act as a segue into Philosophies of the Body P2 thinking about alternative global traditions of thinking about the body and its possibilities for those who choose to take both.

An introduction to the depth psychology of C.G. Jung, including his notions of the structure of the personal and collective unconscious, the function of archetypes and dreams in development and healing, and the transcendent function as it relates to the individuation process. Contemporary advances in Jungian work in such areas as ecopsychology, soul psychology and Jungian feminist thought will also be considered. (also listed as PH203, HS218)

This course is an exploration of Ancient Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism through the lives and writings of mystics associated with each tradition. In addition to reading classical mystical texts in translation, students will attempt to make sense of mystical phenomena by attending to how they are portrayed through film, historical, and scholarly reflection. Counts towards all-college requirements, Religion major, minor, and the Arabic, Islamic, and Middle East Studies thematic minor.

In this course we will explore the question “Is philosophy good for anything?” One reason folks reject studying philosophy is because it seems too abstract to help anyone navigate their real life problems. This class will explore whether it’s true that philosophy is too abstract to be helpful. We will draw from the work of philosophers like Aristotle, Santideva, and Marcus Aurelius as well as a variety of contemporary resources like The Daily Stoic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and more. This course will pay special attention to two major components of practical philosophy - philosophy for kids and philosophical counseling. By the end of the course, students will have a well-developed answer to whether philosophy is actually good for anything.

In this course, students will explore several key philosophical issues in the Buddhist tradition. We begin by asking if we can make sense of the term “Buddhist Philosophy” and then turn to Buddhist views of the self, interdependence, the philosophical role of meditation, and ethics. The focus of this course will be on Mahayana Buddhist thought, although we will occasionally examine Therevada and Vajrayana views as well. We will largely draw on the work of Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, and Dignaga. The goal of this course is to examine questions, and proposed answers, that are critical to the Buddhist philosophical tradition.

What is psychoanalysis? How has psychoanalytic theory revolutionized our understanding of human beings, and how can it and the therapeutic practices associated with it be fundamental in helping us live more free and authentic lives? This course will give students a background in some of the major schools of psychoanalytic thought, from the key ideas in Freud's thought and the idea of a theory of drives, to the development of the Object Relations School and D.W. Winnicott, with it's emphasis on the importance of formative interpersonal relations, to the development of Self-Psychology and Heinz Kohut. Emphasis will be placed on the notion of the self, and what constitutes it's healthy development. We will think about these thinkers in dialogue with various philosophers, such as Rousseau, Bergson, Nietzsche and Marcuse, among others. For all of these thinkers, we will look at the different ways in which they conceptualize the barriers to living a free, creative life, and, concomitantly, what they think it is to flourish as a human being.

In this course we will strive to learn from the perspectives of our hosts, the Maasai people at the Dopoi Center, adjacent to the Maasai Mara Natural Preserve in Southwest Kenya.Some of the themes the course will address are the complex relationship between Indigenous communities and the State under colonial and postcolonial conditions, the way in which the bases for global capitalism that were laid down during the European colonization of the Americas and of Africa endure and continue to produce effects in the age of present-day globalization, the role of Indigenous communities in preserving the natural environment in a world where the natural environment is conceived and treated as a tourist commodity, and the non-neutral concepts of “progress” and “development” and the ways in which the Maasai people conceive and implement alternatives.

Comparative (and connected) exploration of philosophies of the body. In the west, we have inherited a model of the body as object, opposite to the mind - reinforced by a variety of everyday discourses including medical and health discourses as well as those around beauty, capability, and culpability. While this course will historicize continental European theories of mind-body duality, we will dive into specific other philosophical traditions – embodied as well as textual – which offer very different models for the thinking-feeling-subjective body, with their own complexities and critical possibilities. We will address bodies (in motion), perception/cognition, and power (variously defined). Ultimately, these various approaches force us to question what it means to even talk about “a body”.

What is psychoanalysis? How has psychoanalytic theory revolutionized our understanding of human beings, and how can it and the therapeutic practices associated with it be fundamental in helping us live more free and authentic lives? This course will give students a background in some of the major schools of psychoanalytic thought, from the key ideas in Freud's thought and the idea of a theory of drives, to the development of the Object Relations School and D.W. Winnicott, with it's emphasis on the importance of formative interpersonal relations, to the development of Self-Psychology and Heinz Kohut. Emphasis will be placed on the notion of the self, and what constitutes it's healthy development. We will think about these thinkers in dialogue with various philosophers, such as Rousseau, Bergson, Nietzsche and Marcuse, among others. For all of these thinkers, we will look at the different ways in which they conceptualize the barriers to living a free, creative life, and, concomitantly, what they think it is to flourish as a human being.

This course questions anthropocentrism and human/nonhuman animal relations through a specialized, ecocritical and ecofeminist analysis of theoretical, visual and literary texts. In many European and Judeo-Christian representations, the nonhuman animal is subjected to the human, and represented as the carrier of a 'value' or 'message' applicable to the human world. In such cultural texts and artifacts, nonhuman animals tend to not be seen, represented, understood as equals, and/or as members of a completely difference species holding value per se, having abilities and skills not directly exploitable in the anthropocentric world. Recent theory has instead voiced the importance of including analyses of the nonhuman to existing analyses questioning colonialism and exploitations based on religion, gender, race, political ideas. Based on these theoretical reading, we will ask: Which discriminatory mechanisms, which power structures apply, similarly or even identically, to nonhumans and to minority, colonized, discriminated groups? How in turn have some minority groups (such as indigenous people) have fought to include land and animal rights in their own battle for full recognition as equal political subjects? We will work actively as a group and individually to identify the cultural discourses enabling domination and exploitation of nonhuman animals, along other subtler instances of anthropocentrism and speciesism. We will then try to leave behind our anthropocentrism and to come up with creative solutions for a more just interspecies world.