Shigehisa Kuriyama (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)
First-Year Seminar 65X | 4 Credits (Fall 2024) | CANVAS SITE
Monday, 12:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Modern universities offer instruction in a vast and dazzling array of fields, but it is rare to find courses focused explicitly on wisdom. Which is a puzzle: After all, for much of history, wisdom was prized as the supreme and most essential form of knowledge, and there is little doubt that our world still needs it, today, more than ever. Yet somehow, the quest for wisdom seems to have faded from our consciousness, lingering only as a faint and occasional memory, a barely remembered dream.
Why? What is wisdom, and why does the quest for it now seem like something that belongs to a bygone age—an effort to return to a home that is no longer ours?
Our study of these questions will spotlight expressive forms that were long the vehicles for communicating wisdom—proverbs and pictures, parables, fables, riddles, and landmarks. As we probe the modern fate of these traditional forms, we will discover how the vagaries of wisdom are entwined–unexpectedly, but profoundly– with historical changes in memory, experience, and storytelling, and with the evolving relationship between human beings and their environment.