CLS4155

Belief and perception

Millicent Vladiv-Glover

12 points
* 3 hours per week
* Second semester
* Clayton

Objectives On successful completion of this subject students should have a basic familiarity with a range of models of perception, from late 19th century pragmatism to 20th century psychoanalysis, phenomenology and beyond. Employing these models as analytic tools, students should be able to read critically and deconstructively a variety of artistic and cultural texts. Students will be expected to reflect widely on the implications of these models for research in the humanities.

Synopsis The subject will examine the concept of `belief' or `faith' and its derivatives (such as revelation, non-knowledge, negativity) in the context of various theoretical schools which model perception: C S Peirce's Pragmatism, Freud's (Lacan's) Psychoanalysis, M Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language, P Bourdieu's Logic of Practice, G Deleuze's theory of Plateaus. There will be some emphasis on the religious-semiotic writings of the Russian philosopher/mathematician, Pavel Florensky. His work on the (Russian) icon will be correlated to the Western models of `the gaze'. Visual and verbal artistic texts will be used as illustrative material. The basic theoretical corpus offered by the course will be used in application to cultural texts for the purpose of deconstructive analyses of, for instance, `generic' (generative) cultural concepts and images (`sacrifice', `death', `Mother-of-God/Child' icons, `Christ', `hero', `whore', `myth', the `sacred', etc), but also for the `reading' (interpretation) of literary works, art or film.

Assessment One seminar paper (1500 words): 20%
* Research essay (4500 words): 50%
* Examination (3 hours): 30%
* Students may choose to convert the 3-hour examination into an additional essay of 3000 words.

Prescribed texts

Berkeley G Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Prometheus Books, 1988
Bourdieu P The logic of practice tr. R Nice, Polity, 1995 (first published in French 1980)
Blanchot M Thomas the Obscure Station Hill, 1988
Deleuze G and Guattari F A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia U Minnesota P, 1993
Deleuze G Kant's critical philosophy: The doctrine of the faculties U Minnesota P, 1993
Dostoevsky F The devils Penguin
Florensky P `The Point', Geo-graffity: Explorations of physical, cultural, and intellectual landscapes Quantum Bureau of the Russian Academy of Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan 1993) 29- 39
Kafka F The trial Penguin
Kant I Critique of judgement ed./tr. W S Pluhar, Hackett, 1987
Kis D The encyclopaedia of the dead Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1989
Lacan J The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis Norton, 1981
Merleau-Ponty M The primacy of Perception ed. J Edie, Northwestern U P, 1964
Merleau-Ponty M The visible and the invisible followed by working notes Northwestern U P, 1968
Nietzsche F Thus spoke Zarathustra Penguin
Peirce C S Peirce on signs: Writing on semiotics ed. J Hooper, U North Carolina P, 1991
Wittgenstein L Preliminary studies for the `philosophical investigations' generally known as `the blue and brown books' Blackwell, 1969