HUAS90906 - A History of Western Civilization III: Techne and Sophia

Course Description

This third course in a three-quarter sequence will examine the History of Western Civilization, focusing on the relation between technology and “wisdom.” Instead of a political framework, this year’s sequence will examine how changes in technology, primarily information technology, impacted the philosophical and spiritual ideas of a particular culture. In many ways, this revisits the struggle between the “Ancients” and the “Moderns,” that is, between the perennial and the progressive. Students may begin in the Spring Quarter.

Autumn quarter examined the shift from oral to written culture, through the “Axial Age,” and then on into the scribal culture of the High Middle Ages, roughly 1500 BCE to 1450 CE. Winter quarter explored the impact of printing through the early Industrial revolution, 1450 to 1850, and Spring Quarter will focus on developments of the Information Age, from the telegraph through the Internet, 1850 to the present. Rather than a survey, this class will discuss selected primary documents, supplemented by the works of modern historians, to illuminate these developments in the history of ideas.