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UNIVERSITY
WITHOUT WALLS: SPRING 2004 Syllabus By writing The Tragicall Historie of D. Faustus in 1592, Christopher Marlowe elevated the stature of the Faust legend but also compromised the inexorable and pitiless Lutheran morality of the orginal Faust story, which warned against “such forward wits/ To practice more than heavenly power permits”. This course will investigate the perplexing ethical questions raised by this renaissance shift in attitude toward the Faust legend. The flirtation with forbidden knowledge will be studied by drawing on religious (Genesis: the story of Adam and Eve) mythological (Prometheus, Odysseus and the song of the sirens) literary (Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Goethe’s Faust, ) philosophical (Nietzsche, On Truth and Falsity in their Extra-moral Sense) and scientific (J.Robert Oppenheimer, Physics in the Modern World) texts. Taking recent developments in genetic engineering as a case in point, we will ask to what extent the pursuit of knowledge can enhance or be damaging to human experience. The Manhattan Project of the 1940’s and the Human Genome Project of the 1980’s raise questions that have puzzeled mankind throughout history. Why do human beings want to experience everything they can imagine? How can a secular age regulate or make judgements about the potential helpfulness or harmfulness of new knowledge? How has science fiction writing anticipated developments in the natural sciences? These and other questions will be explored to show how literary texts can contain moral issues of lasting concern for the scientific community and for society at large. Texts
Evaluation for grades will be based on:
To prepare the on-line
reports you should write a précis of the article, giving a summary
of the material or argument and a brief resumé of the author.
We will also make an effort to share information from your term papers
with the members of this course as time permits in the last weeks of
the semester.
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