PHIL 291
Violence: Its Trajectory and Its Causes Fall 2018
Division II Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

This tutorial focuses on two books by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of our Nature. Why Violence Has Declined (2011) and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018). We focus first on the controversial theses that—despite two world wars and the Holocaust—the twentieth century was not the most violent so far, and that, over the entire course of history, human beings have become decreasingly violent. We then turn to the books’ explanations of the factors they identify as leading us to be violent—our “inner demons”—and as curbing our violence—our “better angels,” among which the books particularly emphasize reason, science, and humanism.