We never discussed the TED lecture by Jill Bolte Taylor so here are some of my thoughts. I was at first wowed by the description of her stroke. But after Reading  DeMasio and Hustvedt I wonder if Taylor’s autobiographical self  … Continue reading →

Antonio Damasio’s theories of consciousness and the self are complicated and can get bewildering on a first reading. This is partly because he builds the theory through the explanation of relationships among a pretty large number of parts. The good … Continue reading →

Eakin states that autobiography is not “something we read in a book,” but is also “a discourse of identity, delivered bit by bit, in the stories we tell ourselves day in and day out” It is also the story we … Continue reading →

I had never heard of Antonio Damasio before this course, but we seem to have set up shop in a neighborhood where we can’t avoid bumping into him at every corner. A big chunk of the Eakins chapter is devoted … Continue reading →

Eakin’s passage begins with a Walt Whitman quote which is as dramatic as the content of his argument about the self. Eakin offers conjecture coupled with ideas from noted neurobiological thinkers. The content is difficult to fully grasp as much … Continue reading →

This site will be the online home for our course. You will find our course readings, calendar, and requirements here. Each week, half the students in the course will post discussion questions about assigned readings to our course blog; the other … Continue reading →