Spring 2017  |  CSCL 5910 Section 001: Topics in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature -- Science and Scientism in The Humanities (68112)

Instructor(s)
Class Component:
Lecture
Credits:
3-4 Credits
Repeat Credit Limit:
4 Credits
Grading Basis:
Student Option
Instructor Consent:
No Special Consent Required
Instruction Mode:
In Person Term Based
Class Attributes:
Topics Course
Meets With:
ENGL 5090 Section 001
Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
 
01/17/2017 - 05/05/2017
Tue 05:30PM - 08:00PM
UMTC, East Bank
Lind Hall 207A
Also Offered:
Course Catalog Description:
Topics specified in Class Schedule.
Class Notes:
Topic: Science and Scientism in The Humanities
Class Description:
This course will question the effects of the natural sciences on the humanities, especially recently, but also historically. We will study the public and media devaluation of the humanities, the deference to the sciences, and the assumption that there is nothing uniquely "scientific" about the humanities themselves. Also, and more significantly, we will explore the tendency by humanists (literary critics, artists, philosophers and social theorists) to defer to the claims of science: its evidentiary models, its futurisms, its speculative materialism. We will be interested as well in counter-trends: the critique of scientism, for example; resistance to technological or instrumental reason, to a pure productivity without negation, to the death of the subject, and the rhetoric of "being," which is almost everywhere today. We will discuss the many forms of scientism in the humanities: thing theory, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism; object-oriented philosophy, the neo-positivism of distant reading, and the digital humanities. If Julien de la Mettrie in eighteenth-century France regarded man as a self-moving machine, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, calls for "strip[ping] the human sciences of any hermeneutic privilege and assign[ing] the position of chief importance to technoscience, the history of which he equates with Being." Scientism, in short, has a long history.

But there is another side of the coin. The sciences are more and more reliant on ideas taken from the humanities without acknowledgement - the "Big Bang," for example, "the God particle," the "selfish gene." The infiltration of the sciences by the humanities (again, without acknowledgement) is explored in the work of many of the most celebrated theorists of science in practice: viz, Ian Hacking (Historical Ontology and The Emergence of Probability) and Paul Feyerabend, Against Method. We will assess these trends, explore what is methodologically unique to the humanities, weigh the meaning of the word "materialist," discuss the politics of scientism, and think about the reasons for its current prominence. It would have been possible to find relevant readings from many genres: novels, criticism, manifestoes. But for reasons of time, we will concentrate on position pieces, methodological inquiries, and histories of science and the humanities in order to cover as much territory as possible. There are a number of important works on our theme, obviously, that we will not be able to consider. Time permitting, I will be supplying you with supplementary bibliographies to point you in the direction of relevant work by: Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Francis Bacon, Benedict de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, G. W. Leibniz, Giambattista Vico, William Blake, Auguste Comte, Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, J. D. Bernal, Douglas Hofstadter, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruno Latour, Henri Atlan, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Stanislaw Lem, R. F. Georgy, and others.
Textbooks:
https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/68112/1173
Instructor Supplied Information Last Updated:
30 September 2016

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