Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions, taken together, serve as the title of a celebrated painting by the French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Gauguin often pondered these questions as part of his spiritual reflections on the nature of life during a Catholic liturgy class he attended as a young pupil. Our course will be a 16-week philosophical reflection, primarily focused on the second question: What are we? Our guiding assumption is that studying animals reveals more about human behavior, biology, and evolutionary history. Because humans share a common ancestor and many similar biological structures with other species, research on animals provides crucial insights into human mental processes, emotional and cognitive abilities, and social development. Studying animals also allows us to gain an ethically oriented, wiser perspective from which to question our assumptions about the natural world and our place and role within it. Throughout this course, we will adopt a pluralist and interdisciplinary approach to the study of human nature, one that strives to avoid the trap of scientific reductionism. We will integrate ethology (the study of non-human animal behavior), neurobiology (the study of the biological processes and systems underlying brain function and development), comparative psychology (the study of similarities and differences in behavior, mental processes, and cognition across species), ethics (the study of principles, values, and standards governing social conduct), and philosophy of science (the critical study of the foundations, methods, and implications of scientific inquiry).
