PT of Making and Creating

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Visions of human creativity are moral and political theories at their root. How we think about our skills and creative capacities, and how we cultivate them and to what ends, are primary ways in which we consider and shape how we ought to live. Through a close reading of thinkers, including Aristotle, Locke, Arendt, Marx, Thoreau, Adorno and Horkheimer, Heidegger, Paul Tillich, Wendell Berry, Matthew Crawford and others, we will consider many questions about creativity, technology, and the meaning of life. What are humans capable of making and creating? What ought we do with our skills, goals, and capacities? How do capacities to create and make (crafts, tools, technology, things, cultures, homes, art, food, political institutions, ourselves) unlock our potentials? To what ends? What are the demands upon creativity: is there a telos to our making or is it pure convention? What are the limits and dangers to our making? What is the temporal meaning of creating artifacts and tools in a fluctuating world? What are the theological implications? How is politics itself a type of creation? How are creating and self-reliance a mode of politics? The course will be conducted mostly through discussion and in-depth analysis of the assigned readings. Students should be prepared to participate actively, based on a thoughtful reading of the texts.