About this seminar:

In the 2000s, the President's Council on Bioethics published a volume entitled Being Human, which consisted of a selection of readings from great texts on different dimensions of humanity. New developments in bioethics promised to change the very nature of the human body and, therefore, of what it means to be human. In other words, the nature and limits of being human seemed to have become negotiable—we might be able to choose to change those things.

But are such fundamental changes desirable? Are there human goods that they might unknowingly eradicate? To answer that question properly, we require a more complete understanding of what it means to be human. This volume was assembled to clarify some of the most important dimensions of that and to educate students and readers on the basic issues of humanity.

In this reading group, taking our cue from the volume, we will explore what it means to be human. We will look at some of the great statements on what the basic objects of human desire are, whether it makes sense to desire to be perfect, and whether it makes sense to want to be immortal. We will discuss whether the goods we appreciate in our ordinary lives--family, friendship, study, health, enjoyment, dignity--depend on a finite, mortal human nature and how the way we think about those goods changes when we confront the possibility of breaking at least some of those limits.

In brief, the group is intended as a first philosophic inquiry into the good life

Meeting 1: The Search for Perfection

Theme: Human beings have long imagined the possibility of a perfect existence, one free from pain, death, and any kind of flaw. Is this desire reasonable? Is there some sense in which imperfection is a necessary condition of the happiness that we enjoy?

Readings:

- Hawthorne, The Birthmark

- Lewis, Hideous Strength

Meeting 2: Scientific Aspirations and To Heal Sometimes, To Comfort Always

Theme: Science promises to change the world. Though there are many reasons to feel ambivalent about its effects, most view improvements in modern medicine as an unmixed good conferred by scientific progress. In this meeting, we'll examine some of the hopes evinced by science, and consider what they mean for how we think about approaching that foundational human good, bodily health.

We will also consider that rare breed of human beings who see scientific understanding as an end in itself.

Plutarch, Life of Marcellus

Readings:

- Descartes, Discourse on Method

- Feynman, Surely You're Joking...

- Hippocrates, Hippocratic Oath

- Book of Sirach

- Mann, Buddenbrooks

- Eliot, Middlemarch

Meeting 3: Are We Our Bodies?

Theme: What does it mean to be an embodied person? Do the limits placed on us by our bodies have any moral significance? Does having a body shape our purpose as human beings? And if so, how? How do the desires, pleasures, pains and limitations of our fleshly selves bear on the good that we pursue as full human persons?

Readings:

- Plato, Symposium

- Augustine, Confessions

- Bukovsky, Account of Torture

- Angell, Late Innings

- Lynch, Good Grief

Meeting 4: Many Stages, One Life

Theme: In this discussion, we will consider the not-always-comfortable fact that human beings age. What does the aging process entail? How does our age affect the way we view our good? Is aging something to be lamented, celebrated, some mix of the two? What makes one happy in old age?

Readings:

- Aristotle, Rhetoric

- Bacon, Of Youth and Age

- Shakespeare, As You Like It

- Barrie, Peter Pan

- Stevenson, Ordered South

- Tolstoy, War and Peace (all three excerpts)