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I'm Edward Slingerland.
I'm a professor of Asian Studies here at the University of British Columbia
and the course I'll be teaching is called Foundations of Chinese Thought.
So the course has several goals.
The first is to introduce students to the thought of Warring States China.
So this is roughly six to third century BC.
I think it's the most interesting period in philosophy, religious thought
anywhere, any time.
So we'll be learning about early Confucianism, Daoism, legalism,
Maoism, the first hippies ever who advocated just dropping out of society
entirely.
We'll be reading about people who set the foundations
for the autocratic system that eventually unified
China at the end of the Warring States.
So we'll be reading some the most beautiful books ever written
and learning a lot about early Chinese thought.
These early Chinese thinkers were also grappling
with universal human problems.
So they were dealing with issues like the relationship between human nature
and culture, the relationship of the individual
to society, how emotion relates to reason.
And so they're grappling with universal philosophical problems.
So students will learn something about how philosophical debate works.
And the Warring States, in my mind, is a perfect microcosm
of philosophical religious debate in general.
So we're going to try to take advantage of the MOOC platform
to get out of the classroom.
So we'll be combining lectures and PowerPoints
with trips around the UBC campus and the greater Vancouver area.
So we'll be going in the psychology lab and the music studio
in order to talk to colleagues from a variety of disciplines
about their research.
We'll head to downtown Vancouver to talk about issues surrounding
economic inequality and social justice, which
is very relevant to some of the themes we'll be looking at.
Another goal of the class is to connect up all this material
with contemporary concerns.
So first of all, we'll be looking at recent work in cognitive science,
evolutionary theories, social psychology that suggests that a lot of these
views in early China about self cultivation or creativity
or how individuals interact with culture are, in fact,
very profoundly anticipating contemporary discoveries
in the sciences.
So students will actually emerge from this class with a pretty good grasp
of evolutionary theory, dual inheritance, gene culture,
co-evolutionary theory, and understanding
of how to situate all of this in universal debates and philosophy
and religious studies and just basic things
we have to deal with in our everyday lives.