NEH Enduring Questions Course on "Know Thyself: But How?"

FAIN: AQ-50229-10

Furman University (Greenville, SC 29613-0002)
Benjamin Whitton Storey (Project Director: September 2009 to September 2012)

The development of a first-year seminar for undergraduates on the question of self-knowledge from moral, political, theological, and philosophical perspectives.

This project will support the development and teaching of Know Thyself: But How, a course on the question of self-knowledge to be taught at Furman University. This course will investigate the question of self-knowledge as it appears in a series of literary, philosophic, and Biblical texts: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Shakespeare's Richard II, Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, The Book of Job, and Plato's Phaedrus. Students and teacher will investigate what it means to know oneself as a predisciplinary question that arises in moral and political contexts and raises the most fundamental theological and philosophical concerns.