COR 450 CRAVING, DESIRE AND WISDOM IN THE AGE OF AMAZON
Plato argued that virtuous humans can resist appetitive desires, understanding that what appeals to our senses and desires as “good” may be quite the opposite. However, Plato never had to face a late night Papa John’s commercial, a media blitz for the next Halo, or the Amazon recommendation list. As Omar Manejwala illustrates, nor did the Athenian have to consider corporations, who spend orders of magnitude more than universities and the government to study our brains to gain proprietary information on how we come to want and even crave, and how to best make us desire what they wish to sell us. Has our reason been defeated, or can virtuous education still make us capable of resisting our base appetites and the McDonalds dollar menu? We will study the methods and strategies of the combatants in this battle for our minds and money and try to determine if we are more Plato than Homer Simpson. This course is writing intensive. Open to students in the third or fourth year of study.