Teacher: R.J. Snell
Time: 12:45pm-2:45pm on Fridays, lunch provided
Dates: 9/22; 10/6; 10/20; 11/10; 12/1
Place: Whelan Hall, 16 Stockton Street
For the fall semester in keeping with this year’s theme of Language and Freedom, our Living in the Truth seminar will examine the work of Eastern European dissidents, including some thinkers not often studied, on how the manipulation of language by ideology violates the integrity of the human individual, their action, and inquiry, and, further, how the refusal to capitulate to the ideological lie allows the recovery of freedom for even the most powerless of people. For Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Milosz, Patočka, and Wojtyla, being complicit in the ideological lie was to be a “captive mind,” whereas, in the words of Havel, even the most powerless could refuse to allow a deformed language to dominate their understanding.
