Splash Biography

Temple. Prison. Mask. Home. The body and bodily existence have fascinated and devastated humankind from time (probably) immemorial. In this class, we will explore what science, philosophy, and our own experiences reveal about how human sentience—our conscious experience of the world—is inextricably embedded in the realities of an unmistakably physical body. Pain, personality, beauty, meaning, death, and freedom will take center stage as we reflect on existence bound only / totally by "flesh."

Double suicides, Nazi Germany, love that lasts a lifetime, the invention of 0, the Copernican, the French, and the Russian Revolutions ---- a list of evil? insanity? genius? How about "Truth"? Analyzing the most revolutionary discoveries and events in human history and the equally world-shattering events of great art and true love, we'll face down philosopher Alan Badiou's radical idea of Truth and begin to construct for ourselves a world where truly new things can and do happen.

wHY dOes rEaDiNg tHis feEL sO mUCh wORSe...................than reading this? In this class we will look at how 'beauty,' or the success of presentation and style, interacts intimately with content in both art and language. In our critical pursuit of "the beautiful," we will touch on balance and color theory in art, the essential elements of typographic design, as well as the components of style in creative writing. We are not only here to figure beauty out as observers, but also to harness it as creators. We will apply what we learn to our own works of art and language to understand and make "beautiful" more beautiful than "bEaUTiFuL."

Do you revel in being objectified? Do you take pleasure in objectifying others? Must you objectify yourself and everyone around you to prove to yourself that you do indeed, exist? Existentialism and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre together constitute the philosophical ethos of recent modernity. This class will take a risque approach to this philosophical minefield. Through the window of sex and sadomasochism, we will examine how Sartre tells a powerful story of human existence through the interplay of sadistic impulses and masochistic urges.

Loneliness: A condition which makes the worst of days infinitely more unbearable, and a crisis which seems almost epidemic in our world today. On those days that we feel thoroughly awful and terribly alone, wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was a drug to help us cheer up, without the unpleasant side-effect of getting us arrested? In this class, in addition to gaining some significant scientific and cultural insight into the crisis of loneliness which faces the social creature man today, we’ll be making our own ‘medicine’ through a very simple sociopsychological experiment. We will build fleeting but nonetheless real bonds with our fellow humans in the class, and when we take our leave of each other, each of us will have a bottle of actual pull-apart pills, containing scrolls with the written wisdom and well wishes of each of our classmates: a cleverly packaged little something to remind us that there are other real people, living, breathing, hurting, and wishing with us on the planet, for when we need to know it most.