FYS 10 Opening the Aviary: Minds, Ideas, and Matters of Fact
What are we doing when we shout “I have an idea!”? Did the idea originate in our minds or from the world around us? Or even other minds? In the Theaetetus, Plato likened the mind to an aviary in which he compared ideas to captured wild birds that a thinker possesses for a moment until they choose to let them fly free. Mental states, concepts, and theories are deeply personal and part of our inherently subjective experience of reality. At the same time, they are also the epistemic background of societies, cultures, economies, and states. Ideas inform how we think about ourselves, ethics, time, and much more. During the Han dynasty in China, for example, a person aimed to know and live within their place in a hierarchy of mutual reciprocity and respect. In antebellum America, people strived to become totally self-reliant, and eschewed depending on others. Our conception of time itself dates, arguably, to 311 BCE, when the kings of the Seleucid Empire began enforcing a linear chronology of years onto their society. So, understanding ideas, thoughts, concepts––as well as our own sense of what minds are and what knowledge is––as they evolved in their own time and place can reveal to us something vital about a culture. Simply put: ideas have histories. Our seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach to these topics and combine methods from psychology, history, philosophy, and cognitive science to probe the mental world in all its complexity. Together we’ll explore how to make use of our analyses in different kinds of writing situations throughout the course that will enable participants to develop skill in expository writing, composition, research with primary and secondary sources, and techniques for rhetorical analysis. Open only to first year frosh.