Core 1: The Structure of Social Knowledge (3 credits)
Tentative Course Outline
1. Introduction to the problem
Religious approaches; scientific undertanding;
historical perspectives; social and ideological views;
What is the Enlightenment?
2. Descartes and the birth of modern epistemology:
Descartes' definition of the "problem" of what and how we know what we know? The analytic separation of mind and body. Spinoza's dialogue with Descartes: the primacy of the body.
Readings: Descartes, Discourse on Method (selections); Spinoza, Ethics (selections)
3. Is there an "Order" in Nature? Hume's challenge
Reading:David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature (selections)
4. Vico and the introduction of "social" knowledge
Reading: The New Science of Giovanni Battista Vico (selections)
5. "We know of only one science, the science of history"
Reading: Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Part One)
6. Knowledge as Experience.
Reading: John Dewey, Art as Experience
7. Knowledge as Social Representation
Readings: Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia
8. The Nature and Scope of Scientific Knowledge
Readings: Karl Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery;Thomas Kuhn, Structure of
Scientific Revolutions; Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery; Paul Feyerabend,
Against Method
9. Knowledge and Power
Readings: Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory
Life; Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science; Donna Haraway,
Primate Visions
10. The Political Economy of the Production of Knowledge
Reading: Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: its Creation, Distribution and Scientific
Significance