Honors Seminars Fall 2024

The Art and Thought of Personhood

Questions of personhood are ancient, but they remain important in the present. What is a person? Where and when does personhood start and end? What makes the identity of a person persist through time? How do we tell if someone or something is a person in the first place, and what do we owe them (or it) once we make this decision? Can animals and plants and inanimate parts of the environment be persons? What about corporations or artificial intelligences? 

This course will introduce students to some major ideas about persons in the history of philosophy and psychology, and follow those ideas into works of literature, art, and cinema that are invested in exploring them. Our major concern will be to see what literature and art can add to our understanding of the concept of a person; secondary aims of this course include equipping students to enter into contemporary debates about the status of persons in a sophisticated way, and to consider the relevance of these debates to our own lives. Theoretical readings may include work by Aristotle, Boethius, the Buddha, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Freud, James, Beauvoir, and Maslow. We will also likely read work by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Kafka, Woolf, Baldwin, Plath, Philip K. Dick, and other contemporary writers; look at some modern portraiture and photography; and screen some films.