Class Schedule for Spring 2020

The course will highlight how throughout the Western philosophical and scientific tradition, the understanding of our place in the cosmos has undergone significant shifts, which occurs together with radical changes in how we understand ourselves and the physical world as well as ourselves in relation to the physical world.

In order to pursue the question of the place in the cosmos with focus and rigor, the course will concentrate on a few seminal philosophical texts of the Western tradition. These texts will be supplemented with introductory lectures on Ancient cosmology, medieval cosmology, as well as lectures that highlight the fundamental change in the Western understanding of our place in the cosmos through the mathematization of nature, which occurred in the 17th century along with the new astronomical theories of Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.

The course will require close reading and text analysis, and will lead to the critical comparison of different approaches to the question of the human place in the cosmos, as well as to questioning ourselves with respect to how we view our relation to the cosmos today.

PHIL 345 satisfies the criteria for Art & Letters under General Education. Insofar as this course integrates different views and ways of inquiring into the place of humans in the cosmos, it promotes open inquiry from a variety of perspectives. Different philosophical texts claim different principles of order for the cosmos, different ways of understanding space and place, different theories of causation, different articulations of our relations to the stars and to animal and plant life. The question of how we are situated as humans will be addressed and articulated from different creational, moral, physical, intellectual, and spiritual perspective. It thus addresses different main philosophical subject areas like ontology, ethics, and metaphysics.