In the coming sessions, we’ll be working together on your final projects. These may be formal written papers, or more experimental and/or creative submissions. The full briefing is on Canvas.
This is a two-phase process. This week, we will be working on your proposals. Next week and the week after, we will be working on the papers / projects themselves. The aim is to give you as much help as we possibly can so that you turn in excellent final projects.
Check in
We’ll check in to start!
An overview of the past weeks
We started by talking about wisdom (session 1). Then, our first reading was about practices of writing, and practices beyond writing, from Richard Shusterman.
After that, we talked about philosophy as the care of the self (Foucault), and as a technology of the self (session 4).
We moved on to explore ritual as practice in Confucius (session 5), and in Xunzi (session 6). And we also explored the strange, rambling philosophy of Zhuangzi, and the idea of free and easy wandering (session 7).
There’s something pleasurable about just rambling about, so the session after (session 8), we talked about pleasure in Epicureanism. And, because there’s a lot to say about pleasure, in the session after that.
For Epicurus, some pleasures are natural, and some are unnatural. So we enlisted the help of the Cynics (session 11 and session 12) to talk about what is natural, and to explore some radical practices of freedom.
The next two sessions (session 13 and session 14) were on Stoicism, which took up the challenge of asking “what even is nature”—and built a more systematic philosophy of practice, based on logic, ethics and physics.
Of all the philosophies we’ve explored together, two have become fashionable in the present: Stoicism and Buddhism. So in session 15 and session 16, we explored Buddhism and mindfulness. And we then looked at some variations on the Buddhist theme through exploring Zen / Chan (session 17) and Korean Sǒn (session 18).
Finally, we explored ways of queering philosophical practice through María Lugones’s work in session 19 and session 20.
Questions (looking back)
- Which readings did you find most compelling or interesting?
- Which did you like the least?
- Which practices did you find most useful / interesting / challenging?
- Of all these texts, which one most appealed to you as writing? Why?
- What questions do you now have that you didn’t have at the beginning of the course?
Assignment Briefing
Okay! Now I’ll take you through the assignment briefing. It is in two parts: a proposal, and a final paper.
Feedback
Before we start on the final projects, as we’ve got to the end of the formal teaching and the introduction of new content, I’ll share a feedback form from GHEA21, so that you have a chance to share some of your thoughts about the course.