Disciplines are historically contingent. From the standpoint of the twenty-first-century university, the distinction between the sciences and the humanities could not be starker. The methods and insights of one are often defined against those of the other. Facticity is habitually understood as the province of the sciences, and complexity or contextuality as that of the humanities. Yet the emergence of a consensus over such a distinction was neither instinctive nor inevitable. AP/HUMA 1910 tracks the coevolution of what we now accept as scientific and humanistic modes of thinking and knowing from (mainly) the early modern period to the present. 

 AP/HUMA 1910 adopts, as its organizing concept, “human nature,” contemplating it from two perspectives. First, we study human nature as shorthand for the dispositions and characteristics deemed fundamental to the human constitution and the human experience. We follow transitions between conceptions of human nature as fixed, malleable, teachable, evolutive, organic, plastic, and entangled with nonhuman natures. Second, the course looks at the material and ideological conditions that have undergirded the transformation of the natural world through human intervention, such that, in the geological era known as the Anthropocene, no natures appear immune to humanity. 

Ideas of human nature have come with their own dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, guaranteeing certain populations’ access to humanity and relegating others to nature. AP/HUMA 1910 fleshes out these dynamics by centering Black and Indigenous critiques of “modernity.” 

This course surveys a range of scientific and humanistic literatures, in addition to foregrounding the role of art and aesthetics in posing, and working through, scientific and humanistic problems.