Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (PHL3021)
This module description relates to the academic year 2006/7.
| Lecturer(s) | Dr. Lenny Moss & staff |
|---|---|
| Module level | 3 |
| Credit Value | 15.00 |
| ECTS Value | 7.5 |
| Pre-requisites | None - but PHL1002B would be helpful as would modules in the social, cognitive and biological sciences. |
| Co-requisites | None |
| Duration of Module | One Semester : Semester 2 |
| Total Student Study Time | 150 hours including 22 hours of lecture and discussion |
Aims
Philosophical Anthropology aims to ask the most fundamental questions about the nature of human beings as socio-culturally structured, embodied, living organisms in a way that benefits from both the empirical human sciences and our own privileged phenomenological access to the experience of being such beings.
Intended Learning Outcomes
Module-specific skills:
Students will acquire a familiarity with the intellectual legacy of work in philosophical anthropology beginning with Herder, and ranging through the mid-20th century school of Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen, and phenomenologists Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and then to recent thinkers such as Blumenberg, Habermas and Honneth. They will then consider cutting-edge work from contemporary cognitive science, biology, social science and ethology that provides both a kind of empirical check onto the philosophical claims as well as the basis for revisions, modifications and new insights.
Discipline-specific skills:
Students will thus learn to think in a critical and interdisciplinary fashion, posing questions of general human and philosophical interest and seeking insight and evidence while learning to synthesize perspectives ranging across disciplinary divides.
Personal and key skills:
Ability to construct and evaluate ideas, to formulate and express ideas at different levels of abstraction, write well-argued essays, to assess and criticise the views of others.
Learning/Teaching Methods
Meetings will consist of lectures by the instructor and/or presentations by students followed by discussion. Students will be required to keep abreast of reading assignments and to come to class prepared to discuss the reading. The instructor will provide lectures that orient students to both the philosophical and scientific contexts of the work under discussion. Students will be expected to read and report on new work in the sciences with an eye to its relevance to the larger philosophical issues under discussion and its relationship to other empirical studies that have been discussed. Students will provide a 10-minute presentation on selected required readings to help nucleate group discussion and will provide a 10-15 minute presentation on a required essay book-review project that they will be working on.
Assignments
Stuents will write an assessed book review essay of 3000-4000 words and will provide two brief classroom presentations - one on a selected required class reading and the other on the contents of their book review essay.
Assessment
An assessed essay book-review of 3000-4000 words will count for 40% of the final grade, two classroom presentations will count for 10% of the final grade, and a final 90 minute examination at the end of the semester will count for the remaining 50% of the the final grade.
Syllabus Plan
The first 5 meetings of the module will be focused on the philosophical background of philosophical anthropology. Students will become acquainted with the anthropological and phenomenological views of Herder, Kant, Buber, Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, Cassirer, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Landmann, Blumenberg, Habermas, Honneth, Taylor and others. The remaining six meetings will be devoted to examining contemporary work in cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology and ethology that is relevant to the core philosophical claims and perspectives. Readings will be selected from amongst authors and investigators including Merlin Donald, Robert Bellah, Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher, Andy Clark, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Jonathan Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Walter Freeman, Gerald Edelman, Michael Merzenich, Frans de Waal, Randall Collins, Robin Dunbar, Wendy James and others.
Indicative Basic Reading List
D. Weiss (editor) Interpreting Man (readings from Plessner, Gehlen, Cassirer, Buber, Scheler, Landmann, et.al.)
A. Honneth & H. Joas: Social Action and Human Nature
J. Herder "On the Origin of Language"
J. Kant: Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View
J. Habermas: Knowledge and Human Interest
M. Heidegger: Fundamental Problems of Metaphysics
M. Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception
M. Donald: A Mind So Rare
H. Dreyfus: On the Internet
S. Gallagher: How the Body Shapes the Mind
G. Lakoff & M. Johnson: Philosophy in the Flesh
A. Clark: Natural Born Cyborgs
G. Edelman: Wider than the Sky
F. de Waal: Our Inner Ape
R. Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
W. James: The Ceremonial Animal
R. Dunbar: Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language
J. Turner: On the Origins of Human Emotions
