Week 11.1: Invisible Hands (Resource Extraction)

Harold C. Harvey, St. Just Tin Miners (1935)

Reading:
Invisible Hands, 191-196
Either Albert Mwanaumo or Clive Porabou interview
Viewing: Harold C. Harvey, St. Just Tin Miners (website)

Study Questions:
1. Consider the shape of the oral histories that you've read so far. How do they all begin? How do they progress? Where have they tended to end? How might you use this in shaping your own oral history?


2. What strikes you as the most interesting/significant aspect of the oral history that you read today? What do you believe you should take away from the oral history? What do your peers need to know about the oral history you read?

Week 3.2: John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Georges Lacombe, Chestnut Gatherers (1893)

John Locke (1632-1704) was a British philosopher, Oxford academic and medical researcher. Locke's monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is one of the first great defenses of empiricism and concerns itself with determining the limits of human understanding in respect to a wide spectrum of topics. It thus tells us in some detail what one can legitimately claim to know and what one cannot. Among Locke's political works he is most famous for The Second Treatise of Government in which he argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights and the social contract. He is also famous for calling for the separation of Church and State in his Letter Concerning Toleration. Much of Locke's work is characterized by opposition to authoritarianism. This is apparent both on the level of the individual person and on the level of institutions such as government and church. For the individual, Locke wants each of us to use reason to search after truth rather than simply accept the opinion of authorities or be subject to superstition. He wants us to proportion assent to propositions to the evidence for them. On the level of institutions it becomes important to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate functions of institutions and to make the corresponding distinction for the uses of force by these institutions. Locke believes that using reason to try to grasp the truth, and determine the legitimate functions of institutions will optimize human flourishing for the individual and society both in respect to its material and spiritual welfare. This in turn, amounts to following natural law and the fulfillment of the divine purpose for humanity. (adapted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Reading:

John Locke, "The Second Treatise of Government" (395-404) 

Viewing: Georges Lacombe, Chestnut Gatherers (1893)
Review: Debate Assignment
Today's Reading Can Be Found in Our Course Packet

 Study Questions:

1. What is Locke's theory of property? How does this relate to the founding of political communities? 

2. What is the connection between his assumptions about property and slavery? 

3. What does the debate assignment ask you to do? What questions do you have? 

Week 1.2: Creation & The Sabbath

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (1512)

Humanists approach the Bible not as sacred scripture, but as a historically important text that is rich with literary and philosophical insight. Within the humanities, literary scholars and religious studies scholars pay particular attention to the Bible, but do so in very different ways. Jack Miles, a literary critic known for his celebrated biography of God, uses an extended metaphor of a stained glass window to discuss how these two fields differ in their approach to the Bible. On the one hand, the religious studies scholar hopes to look through the stained glass window in order to see the historical context of the text's production or representation. For these scholars, the stained glass--the text itself--sometimes obscures the historical truth for religious, ideological, or political reasons. On the other hand, the literary scholar is more content to admire the stained glass and study how the shape of its panels and the interplay of colors produce meaning. Both these methods are very different than devotional readings of the Bible. This form of reading might be said to gaze at the stained glass as an aid to worship. This being a humanities class in a secular state-funded college, we will approach the text from a humanistic perspective using both the methodologies of literary and religious studies.

One of the major insights of religious studies into the Bible is source criticism. Source criticism dates back to the 18th-century and is an attempt to identify the different sources for the Bible. Out of this criticism emerged the documentary hypothesis which claims that four basic sources comprise the Five Books of Moses (Torah). These four sources are the Yahwist (J), Elhoist (E), Priestly (P), and Deuteronomist (D). These four sources help explain the apparent contradictions within the Bible as stemming from different sources and traditions. According to Bible scholars, the J source refers to God only as Yahweh and comes from the Southern Israelite Kingdom of Judea. In contrast, the E source refers to God as Elohim and comes from the Northern Israelite Kingdom of Israel. The Priestly author  wrote most of Leviticus and is primarily concerned with the religious observance of the temple practice of the Jerusalem cult. The D source wrote Deuteronomy and parts of Joshua, Judges, and I and II Samuel. All were combined by the Biblical redactor, a composite figure who weaved the various strands of the Bible together. 

The reading from the King James Bible comes from both J and P. The Creation story of the Bible, you will note, is given twice. The First account of Creation comes from P and presents a vision of God who creates the world through his voice alone. The second account, the one made famous by John Milton and countless painters of fig leaves, comes from J and features God making man from the clay and soil.

Reading:

King James Bible, Genesis 1:1-3:24, Exodus 20:8-11

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath 3-10, 26-32

View: Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (website)
Today's Reading Can Be Found in Our Course Packet

Study Questions:

PLEASE READ BEFORE ANSWERING: Throughout our term, I will assign you study questions. These questions are due at the beginning of class and must be typed with a proper header. You must be prepared to hand these in at the beginning of class. In other words, answers handwritten during class will not be accepted. Unless I state otherwise, your answers should be about a paragraph long. Directions on how to properly compose a paragraph (with a topic sentence, cited evidence, and analysis) can be found here. When dealing with primary texts, you should quote directly from the text using MLA standards. Our discussions in class will stem from your answers to these questions. 

1. How does God's work differ in the J and P portions of the text?

2. In the  Bible, what is the connection between Creation and the Sabbath? How does this connect the divine to humanity? 

3. According to Abraham Joshua Heschel, what is the relationship to labor and toil? How does this compare to our discussion of Arendt's notion of work and labor from our first day of class? What does Heschel have to say about time and space?