When philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, “What is it like to be a bat?”, he comes up against a core problem: humans can only think in human terms. As Nagel says, “If I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” But do not despair. We can dare to push beyond Nagel’s limits. Moving between science, philosophy, and art, this seminar will explore possible paths for understanding the subjective experience of non-human animals.

We will begin with human and non-human umwelt or life-worlds. Attuning to our own sensory inputs, mental constructs, and bodily movement, we will describe our life-worlds and then attend to the senses, mental matrixes, and corporeal movement of various animals. Then, drawing on thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Young, and Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, we will bend our subjective experience to more fully develop “what it is like” to be other-than-human. Over the course of the seminar, each participant will create paths of kinship with their selected other creatures and present ways of understanding these non-human life-worlds.

No background in philosophy is necessary. Bring curiosity, creativity, and wonder. 

Led by Ron Broglio, Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.

Mondays, 6:30-9:00pm
July 6th-20th

55 Washington St. in DUMBO

Image credit: “Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo” by Henri Rousseau, via public domain.