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In Search of Human Nature: Why History is So Vital for Our Understanding of What
It Means to Be Human

Famous Stories We Tell Ourselves (I): The ‘Discovery’ of the Individual or the ‘Self-Fashioning’ of Renaissance Man? Jacob Burckhardt and Stephen Greenblatt

Famous Stories We Tell Ourselves (II): The ‘Scientific Revolution’

Discovering Human Nature? The Case of Sixteenth–Century Anatomy

READING WEEK

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Of Monsters and Cannibals: Europeans Encounter the New World ‘Other’

Challenging God’s Power? The ‘Invention’ of a 'Curious' Human Nature in the Seventeenth Century

Body and Soul Re-Thought: Man as Machine and the Changing Animal/Human Relationship in the 17th Century

Who is 'Man'? The Quest for Human Nature and the ‘Science of Man’ in the Enlightenment

Is the Savage Noble: Exploration, Cross-Cultural Encounter and the Question of Human Races in the 18th Century

‘All Men are Equal’: But Women are Not!

Human Nature, Commerce and Corruption: The Invention of a 'Homo Economicus' in the Eighteenth Century

The ‘Invention’ of Pornography: Exploring Man’s Sexual Fantasies

READING WEEK

Bringing the Psyche into Focus (II): The Problem of the Individual Self and Its Relationship to Society

The Theory of Evolution and Its Problems 

‘Penis Envy’, ‘Castration Anxiety’, ‘Oedipus Complex’ and ‘Perversion’:

the Invention of an Unconscious Human Nature in 19th-Century Vienna 

Summer Term

Week 1: NO LECTURE -- please watch the first episode of in your own time of Adam Curtis documentary 'The Century of the Self' (2002) -- available on Youtube. one version is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

blurb of series: How Freud's theories on the unconscious led to the development of public relations by his nephew Edward Bernays. How human desire came to trump human need and 'the dream' of self-actualisation became a means of achieving economic growth and the political control of populations.

Reading: Ewen, Stuart, PR! A Social History of Spin New York, Basic Books, 1996. fantastic book on Bernays!

Bernays, Edward L, 'The Engineering of Consent', in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 03/1947, Volume 250, Issue 1 (online library).

Bernays, Edward L., Propaganda. The Public Mind in the Making (1928). Reprint 2005.

Week 1: Revision of Term I (lecture and seminar) wrap up term 1

Week 2: Revision of Term II (lecture and seminar) wrap up 2 2015