Ireland

Mental experience is not always anchored to the present moment; instead, when the constraints of cognitive control are released, the mind is free to transition from one mental state to the next. Spontaneous thought encompasses a range of mental phenomena that are an intrinsic part of the human experience. These include mind-wandering, daydreams, vivid fantasy, inner speech, creative insights and the nightly manifestations of dreaming. There are also negative ramifications of an excessively wandering mind including distractibility in disorders of attention, obsessive thoughts in OCD, uncontrolled ruminations in depression, and disinhibited traumatic imagery in PTSD. This course asks, what are these various unconstrained modes of thought? How are they generated and instantiated in the brain? Why does the mind and brain devote time and energy to generating these spontaneous mental states? Moreover, this course considers how we can guard against unwarranted mind-wandering by reflecting on techniques such as meditation, mindfulness and their philosophical origins, and how altered states of consciousness can shed light on the content and dynamics of spontaneous thought.

This course provides an introductory understanding of the processes that shaped the modern Middle East from the turn of the 20th century to today. It seeks to engage with the history of the region from within as it examines themes like colonialism, nationalism, international relations, social and political movements and intellectual trends. The course provides a foundation for more advanced discussions of politics and society in the region.

Nowadays, writing is generally seen as one of the great human inventions. But the notion that writing was invented by humans has not at all times been self-evident and accepted. For long periods of history, writing was seen as a domain of the gods and of their representatives. In diverse traditions, letters were thought to have preceded the creation of the world. By some, the whole act of creation was conceived as a form of writing, and therefore signatures were thought to be embedded in all creatures. Some aspects of this tradition have been perpetuated even after the secularizations of modernity: there are still discourses that refer to writing without a human writer and without a human reader. The world is still thought to be full of nonhuman entities (animals, plants and anorganic matter) that leave traces and inscriptions for other nonhuman entities to read. A prominent example is the “deciphered” genetic code. Machines obviously also have learned to read and write to one another. Furthermore, psychoanalysis has asserted that the human psyche engages in writing and reading procedures of which the human subject is unaware. In this seminar, students read and discuss literary and theoretical texts that engage with these nonhuman forms of writing (and that sometimes even claim some kind of “nonhuman” status for themselves).