Readings:

See Description.

Course Description:

“The nature within us,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “must have some relation to Nature outside us … It is no longer a matter of constructing arguments but of seeing how all this hangs together.”

In this seminar, we will explore how notions of nature, milieu, habit and life “hang together” (or do not) as we travel through writings by philosophers, physiologists, psychologists and philosophers of science. Readings will include works (or extracts of works) by figures such as  Descartes,  Kant (Critique of Teleological Reason), Félix Ravaisson (On Habit),  Claude Bernard (Introduction to the Studies of Experimental Medicine, with special attention to the notion of “interior milieu”), Théodule Ribot (on attention and memory), Xavier Bichat  (from Physiological Researches upon Life and Death),  Bergson (especially Matter and Memory, considered in relation to Ravaisson),  Georges Canguilhem (“The Normal and the Pathological”), Merleau-Ponty (especially Nature, Notes from the Collège de France  but with extracts from The Philosophy of Perception) and  Georges Simondon (on individuation and milieu).  We will also consider more recent writings: Mark Sinclair (on Bergson and Ravaisson), Brian Massumi, and Isabelle Stengers. In the course of our travels we will keep in mind Merleau-Ponty’s reminder that “The concept of Nature is always the expression of an ontology – and its privileged expression,” and Georges Canguilhem’s insistence that milieu has become “an indispensable category of modern thought.”

Additional Information:

This course also accepted for 240 course requirement in DE in Critical Theory.

Reading knowledge of French would be helpful but not essential, as most of our readings will be available in English translation.