The Questioning of Intelligence, Part Two: The Inheritance
Tutor: John Thornton
Saturdays, 10am to 2pm
Ten weeks, 5th Jan – 9th April 2022
Venue: The Brighthelm Centre Chapel, North Road, Brighton BN1 1YD. With thanks to The Brighthelm Centre for their generous support.
Sign up to our learning forum on Ryver for updates, course notes and extended class discussions.
Part Two of the course covers the middle four chapters of the book (starting at Chapter Six), tracing the collapse of the ideal of universal reason, from British empiricism, through Kant to Darwin, and the advent of contemporary scientific materialism. We examine this trajectory phenomenologically, not treating it as something past and done with, but seeing how its inheritance is shaping our experience and understanding of the world we live in today. This leads to a closer examination of our modern form of reflective egoistic self-consciousness – the very consciousness that Descartes made explicit in his meditations – and to explore the possibility of our going beyond such consciousness, into the pure not knowing of a phenomenological reduction.
Note: Part Two of the course assumes you have completed Part One. Students can join the course without attending Part One on the understanding that they will have already read the first five chapters of The Questioning of Intelligence and listened to the Part One lecture recordings.