Course Descriptions

This seminar explores selected works of three highly influential integral thinkers. Hegel’s “Science of Wisdom”, both a system of complete knowledge and a method for its (re)creation, played a generative role in such subsequent movements as existentialism, phenomenology, Marxism, and post-structuralism. Ken Wilber, though more popular in tone than Hegel, has produced a still evolving “theory of everything” with equal pretensions to systematic completeness. While both Wilber and Edgar Morin acknowledge their debt to Hegel, Morin nevertheless renounces the possibility of such completeness, choosing instead to cultivate a “method” or way of knowing which might prove adequate to the complexity of the real. All three thinkers are essential to any serious student of integral inquiry seeking to understand the complex landscapes of science, politics, and culture at large in this most critical phase of the planetary era.