Theological Ethics: On Happiness and Desire (CT3100T)

Content

This unit explores the Aristotelian claim that ethics is the pursuit of eudaimonia, happiness. Between ancient and modern theological ethical texts, we will explore the problem of anthropogenesis, becoming human, as the problem of ordering life toward some end. How one thinks about and uses pleasure, pain, joy, grief, sorrow, and other affective forms will form the ground on which we will think about ethics as a mode of performing and imagining human desire, the prerequisite for happiness.

Learning outcomes

Unit sequence

At least 18 cp in CT

Pedagogy

Flipped classroom

Indicative Bibliography

• Aristotle, trans., Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• Butler, Judith, Giving An Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
• Cavarero, Andrea, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
• Fanon, Frantz, trans., Richard Philcox, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 2008).
• Foucault, Michel, trans., Robert Hurley, The History of Sexuality: Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (London: Penguin Books, 1985).
• Kotsko, Adam. What is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life (New York: Fordham University Press 2021).
• Lacan, Jacques, trans., Denis Porter, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton: 1997).
• Lorde, Audre, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books. 2018).
• Rose, Marika. Theology for the End of the World (London: SCM Press, 2021).
• Sophocles, trans., Robert Fagles, “Antigone” in Three Theban Plays (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 55-128.

Assessment