POL 396 - Seminar in Political Philosophy

FDR: SS2
Credits: 3 in fall and winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Offered when interest is expressed and departmental resources permit.

Prerequisite: POL 111 or permission of the instructor. An examination of selected questions and problems in political philosophy and/or political theory. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.

Topic for Winter 2012:

POL 396: Seminar in Political Philosophy: Political, Social, and Party Animal (3). A pairing of David Brooks’ The Social Animal and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons with Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Jane Austen’s Persuasion. We study whether and how Smith’s and Austen’s depiction of sentiments and sensibility foreshadows contemporary developments in the sciences of brain and behavior, insofar as these propose a new understanding of what it is to be a human political, social, and gregarious animal. At the heart of our inquiry are a range of consequences, political and philosophical, that follow from two statements often said to define the character of our liberal, commercial, and scientific modernity: Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” and Nietzsche’s “God is Dead.” (SS2) Velásquez.