FREN 6020

Theories of the Soul

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023.

While the old concept of the "mind" has been revamped over the last few decades and is routinely accepted as a "scientific object" (through cognitive studies, especially), the equally ancient idea of the soul has now largely been relegated to an article of faith or a metaphor for the psyche.  But our minds need a soul more than we'd like to think.  Our aim in this seminar is to reconstruct a theory of the soul as a mental potentiality that would not necessarily be religious nor conditioned by a belief in the afterlife. To make this slightly paradoxical case, we'll revisit a canonical corpus made of literary and philosophical texts and tie it to recent cognitive science, psychoanalysis or phenomenology.

When Offered Spring.

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