NEXT SUMMER. This course exists because students in my MALA course last summer requested a course on Identity. What would you like me to offer next summer? One possibility, in light of the times we're living through: Democracy-Past, Present...Future? We could read Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States, John Dewey'sDemocracy and Education, Robert Talisse's Overdoing Democracy: Putting Politics in its Place, and if we wanted to be really classical about it we could go back to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and J.S. Mill's On Liberty [More possible texts on democracy... How Democracy Ends]... OR, more broadly, a course on The Future of Life... examining the prospects for our species and its successors in the decades and centuries ahead. We could read Stewart Brand's The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, E.O. Wilson's The Future of Life, any number of sci-fi titles... OR, a course on how digital technology is changing the way we live, for better and for worse? OR, what do you suggest? I'd happily reprise my Evolution in America course, or Science and Religion, or American Philosophy, the Philosophy of Happiness, the Environment, Bioethics, Consciousness, Cosmic Philosophy, Cosmopolitanism, the Philosophy of Sports, the Philosophy of Film,... you name it.
I'm leaning towards "Democracy in America Revisited," subject to your ideas...
Democracy would be an apt topic as we will be in the midst of the presidential campaign.
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