Apprehending the World: Feeling, Knowing, and Believing
Course Description
What does it feel like to know something? Is that feeling reliable—or can we feel certain in our convictions but our knowledge is incorrect? This seminar explores the experience of knowing however it arrives: through flashes of understanding, via the slow burn of sensing something is true before we can say why, the discomfort of doubt. As a course in the Graduate School of Education, this seminar focuses on a cluster of fundamentally educational concerns that often end up under the heading of “knowing.”
Class activities will take us beyond the seminar room—to a museum, to a performance, to the library—where we might challenge ourselves to expand understanding of what we know and how we know it. Drawing on research from education, religion, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and literature, we will explore how feeling, knowing, and believing are not three separate things but deeply entangled modes of apprehending the world. To keep our attention focused, our seminar will be virtually computer-and-phone free, so we can be left alone to explore how we make sense of the world around us.
Meet the Instructor: Ari Y. Kelman
“Hi. I'm a professor in the school of education, where I study religion. Most of my work focuses on two entangled questions: (a) How do people come to hold religious commitments? and (b) how do religious communities advance ideas they think are important for their members to hold? I got into this scholarly game through studying music, not religion. My experiences with music—my love of certain artists, my conviction about my tastes, the feeling of being at live concerts and of playing music with others—have shown me over and over again that knowing and feeling do not typically abide by measures that are easily tested. Instead, I find myself looking elsewhere to understand how it is that people hold the commitments they do—to people, to ideas, to aesthetics, and to themselves."
Of related interest
Buddha's Brain and the New Science of Mind
