Seminar
What is Social Science? Charles Taylor’s Catholic Vision of Human Behavior
University of Southern California University Park Campus 3551 Trousdale Pkwy, Los Angeles, CAAre the social sciences properly scientific? Will we one day discover a social physics—perhaps a blend of psychology, economics, and algorithms—that allows us to predict and engineer our common life? No one has done more intellectual work to cast doubt on these techno-utopian claims than Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. In this seminar we will explore Taylor’s argument that the study of human behavior should be closer to history and literature than biology and statistics. Is the human mind no more than a wet computer, or does selfhood possess moral and artistic dimensions? Can we understand politics by calculating large-scale voter...