Fall 2019 Online Course Offerings

Introduction to Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness

Professor Sean Kelly



This course is the required introduction for all master's and doctoral PCC students in their first year of coursework. It has three goals: First, it allows students to become familiar with the scholarly work and world views of the several core PCC faculty, each of whom presents the key ideas and insights that teacher most wishes to emphasize as his or her contribution to the academic content and larger vision of the PCC program. Second, students meet each other at the start of their journey in the program and gain a sense of their cohort and the PCC community. Third, the course includes an introduction to essential skills in research, writing, and strategies for enhancing their learning experience throughout the course of the program. (3 Units)

Love, Death, and Annihilation

Professors Brian Swimme and Carolyn Cooke



Out of thirty million species of life on Earth, Homo sapiens is singular in its need for imaginative works in order to complete the movement from infancy to maturity. When we reflect on the devastation taking place throughout the Earth Community at this time, we need to ask the obvious question: Why have our symbolic works failed so spectacularly? Part of the answer can be seen in the shift in our universities from communities focused on awakening the deep qualities of humanity to training camps for attaining the particular cognitive skills required by our corporations. Departments of Philosophy throughout America are emblematic of this devolution. Instead of fostering the quest for truth, our academic philosophers convinced themselves they should make their field “scientific” by avoiding such, for them, embarrassing topics as “wisdom” or “the meaning of life”. The human impulse to reflect upon the deep questions of our existence does not cease because of the hyper specialization and fragmentation of the modern university. If philosophers are going to abandon this quest, the novelists, filmmakers, and other artists will take up the challenge to pro-vide the works of the imagination necessary for human development. (3 Units)



Science, Ecology, and Contested Knowledge

Professor Elizabeth Allison



To understand the current ecological crisis, we need to investigate the ontological and epistemological foundations of our knowledge about the environment. The science of ecology, in its social and biophysical permutations, is a dominant way of understanding the natural environment. Examining the social construction of scientific and ecological knowledge will shed light on how we know and what we know about the natural environment. In this course, we will critically examine the social construction of scientific and ecological knowledge, coming to see Western scientific knolwedge as a particular cultural phenomenon. We will examine countervailing epistemological understandings, such as situated knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge, that challenge the idea of a dispassionate and omniscient scientific viewpoint. We will investigate the compatibility of religious and spiritual insights with ecological knowledge. Applying feminist and non-Western epistemologies to environmental issues, we will seek to generate alternative ways of understanding ecological crises, which may, in turn, generate healing alternatives. (3 Units)



Advanced Seminar - A. N. Whitehead's Process and Reality

Professor Matthew T. Segall



By the mid-1920s, the new quantum and relativity theories had already succeeded in turning the old mechanical philosophy of Nature inside out by transforming matter into light and merging space and time together with gravity. The classical explanations of Nature oﬀered by a once confident scientific materialism no longer made any sense. A second scientific revolution was afoot. At the same time, in philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to close the door to further metaphysical speculation upon the ultimate nature of things: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The physicists struggling to come to terms with their discoveries could henceforth expect no help from philosophers. In protest against the logical positivism of his era, which decided to give up on understanding Nature and withdraw into the analysis of scientific formalisms and statistics, Whitehead awoke from the dogmatic slumber of the Newtonian paradigm and attempted to make natural science philosophical again. He sought novel insight into depths of reality as yet unspoken. In Process & Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Whitehead aims for nothing less than the construction of an organic system of the universe that not only brings quantum and relativity theories into coherence, but gathers up scientific truths, aesthetic feelings, and religious values into an integral vision of the whole.

Students in this advanced seminar will engage in a close reading of Whitehead’s (350 page) “essay.” This text is widely considered to be one of the most obscure in the Western tradition. That is perhaps because Whitehead’s organic and process-relational way of seeing the world is so unusual. He often found it necessary to invent new words, or to use old words in new ways. His text will be supplemented with secondary readings by scholars skilled at elucidating the finer points of the “philosophy of organism” (e.g., Isabelle Stengers, Randall Auxier and Gary Herstein, Catherine Keller). (3 Units)

Modern Western Esotercism

Professor Robert Mcdermott

This course explores the biographies, non-ordinary ways of knowing, extraordinary ideas, and influence of three 20 thcentury esoteric teachers. There are excellent reasons for studying them as well as reasons why they are not studied by mainstream disciplines. Some of their claims and claims on their behalf clearly fall outside the dominant paradigm—and yet, and yet, they might be more true and more efficacious than established ways of thinking and accepted accounts of reality. In his classic text, Varieties of Religious Experience, William James urged that in order to understand religious experience we should call in the experts. There are few if any spiritual teachers more expert than the three to be studied in this course: Madame Blavatsky (HPB), Rudolf Steiner, and Mirra Alfassa (The Mother). (3 Units)