General Information
Course Description
9630 Enlightenment Theories of Mind, Soul, Spirit [B] - Mary Helen McMurran
The Enlightenment is re-emerging in such projects as the international “Re-Enlightenment” initiative which engages the history and present conditions of knowledge-making, and with a growing body of scholarship contesting long-held assumptions about the Enlightenment’s commitment to such core values as secularism and rationalism. This course takes up Enlightenment theories of mind and consciousness in relation to the soul and spirit in the period from Descartes to Kant. We will focus our inquiry on the Enlightenment’s investment in a new model of mental consciousness and ask whether or how it secularizes human nature and nature itself. Does the Enlightenment account of the senses, imagination, and cognition effectively replace the soul and enspirited worlds? Or is spirit uncomfortably present and lodged in these theories, ready to be reclaimed? Analyses of the concepts of mind and spirit will also enable us to trace the early history of aesthetics, as well as examine Cartesian dualism, empiricism, materialism and the Enlightenment’s historical psychology in which these theories arose. Readings are taken from foundational works of French, Scottish, and German Enlightenment figures.
Primary Texts:
Locke, from Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Addison, “Pleasures of the Imagination” essays
Fontenelle, On the Origin of Fables and History of Oracles
Vico, New Science
Hume, from Treatise on Human Nature, writings on religion
La Mettrie, Man a Machine
Kant, from Critique of the Power of Judgment
Secondary Texts may include: Foucault, “What is Enlightenment”; Simon During, Modern Enchantments; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested; Leigh Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment
