Intelligence: Human, Animal, Artificial

Undergraduate

What does it mean to be intelligent? This seminar traces the idea of intelligence across species, centuries, and systems — from Plato’s vision of the rational soul, through Aristotle’s reflections on perception and movement, to contemporary discussions of emotional, embodied, collective, and artificial minds. We read philosophers, psychologists, and novelists who have asked how minds know, feel, coordinate, and create. Classical accounts of reason and virtue are paired with modern research on habit, gesture, and social learning, and with current debates about neural networks and generative AI. Our project, in the end, is less to define intelligence than to watch it refract — through reason and emotion, habit and invention, solitude and community — and to ask what those refractions reveal about how we come to know, and what it might mean to understand. The point is not to settle what intelligence is, but to examine what our attempts to define it disclose — about the world, and about ourselves. This course is appropriate for juniors and seniors who are completing majors in Philosophy, Cognitive Science, or Humanities. Open to students have taken at least 4 previous philosophy classes, with preference to students who are completing capstone requirements. HU W 7pm-8:55pm