HI 208 - The Enlightenment

Credit Hours: 3

This seminar involves a close reading of original Enlightenment texts as intellectual history and a way of situating historical and contemporary understandings of freedom, the role of reason, self-determination, the individual, and society. A critical evaluation of original texts and a study of eighteenth-century kindling of self-conscious social thought and its influence on the rational organization of society and social institutions in the formative years of the modern natural and social sciences.

Course Outcomes
Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

the distinction between reason and faith as tools for world understanding;
what Enlightenment means;
the social forces that gave rise to the Enlightenment movement;
the origins of contemporary individualism in classical liberal thought;
the historical origins of experimental science;
the contrast between the libratory claims of the philosophes and other Enlightenment thinkers with their outcomes and with feudal social circumstances;
the roots of American founding ideas in the context of the Enlightenment social movement;
the distinction between concepts of 18th-century market freedom and Encyclopedíste notions of freedom;
the distinction between concepts of political emancipation and human emancipation; and
the distinction between the social contract’s atomistic conception of individuals and the social production of individuals as bases for conceptualizing the human person.

Prerequisites: Either HI 100, HI 109, HI 111, participation in the Honors program, OR permission of the instructor.
F/S (C, S)