First-Year Studies: Varieties of Intellectual Dissent

In this course, we will explore the question of what it means “to think differently” as a powerful approach to understanding the nature of human thought. To set the stage, we will begin with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a novel in which religious and political worldviews clash as the Devil pays a visit to the Moscow of the 1930s. We will be led to consider the processes of grafting a framework of religious and philosophical thought, Christianity in our case, onto a pre-existing cultural worldview and, in the aftermath Bulgakov portrays, to tease out the logical issues of alternative modes of thinking from the political issues of standing up to power in the name of personal dignity or moral justice. For context, we will read relevant selections from the Old and the New Testaments. We will then turn to Plato’s Republic and, while aiming to grasp the text as a whole, will focus especially on the portrayal of Socrates. As a philosopher, Socrates both exemplifies and reflects on the fundamental incommensurability of his thought with those of his fellow citizens, as illustrated in the dialogue by the Allegory of the Cave and dramatized by Socrates’s trial-and-death sentence. Our next source will be a three-part play, Slings and Arrows, in which we will pay special attention to the challenges of bringing three of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies to life in a vastly altered historical context—that of contemporary North America. In addition to watching the performance, we will read Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, as well as Oedipus Rex and several texts of Freud. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, our next work, argues that periods of radical intellectual divergence are built into the very structure of science as a cultural institution. The book will equip us with further conceptual tools for thinking about thought and the complexities of its operation in society. We will conclude the course with Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language, an autobiography that attends to the issues of thinking in incompatibly different ways from the perspective of someone brought up in one culture and then transplanted to another. When intellectual universes collide, when individuals with powerful alternatives to our modes of thinking appear in our midst, when an earlier worldview comes alive across historical discontinuities, when transitions to sweepingly novel conceptions constitute a normal part of an intellectual pursuit, when a subject of one cultural perspective translates herself into another—five works of different genres will provide us with rich and multifaceted material for a philosophical exploration of thinking in radically diverse ways.