Borderology

The course borderology will promote the students own reflection and develop their personal and professional identity. The aim is to present the border between Norway and Russia and various other kinds of borders as part of a changing global world, where fortifications, walls, barriers and fences and other means of identity control, primarily directed against foreigners, can be turned into instruments of respect for the other in oneself. A change in our understanding of the border may effect the status of the border itself. The course borderology consists of 6 modules. Each of the modules has its own content and contributes in its own way to the learning outcome of the course as a whole.

Module: Professional Identity The module will introduce the students to different approaches to the concept of professionalism and identity. It will in particular focus on the development of and relation between personality, self and identity in the context building up professionalism.

Module: Borderology II The primary focus of borderology is the border zone as a ¿Lebenswelt¿ furthering and developing a cosmopolitan attitude in its inhabitants that may promote peace. The secondary focus is on the formation and cooperation of border zones all over the world. This cooperation on a global scale may be seen as a system of international communication that may function as an alternative to state diplomacy.

The students will be invited to study the Barents Secretariat as an example of a new type of peace-promoting institution localized in a border zone, giving the commopolitan ambitions of the cross border cooperation a new dressing.

The students will in Borderology II be invited to concentrate theoretically and critically on the concept of state sovereignty, a concept that has recently been analyzed by Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer, Agamben totally revises the main political idea of the state from Kant to the present day. Also Foucaults tough criticism of the Western Civilization and Nicolaj Berdjajevs in many ways methodically similar book on Russian intellectual history will be introduced in the same discussion.

Module: The 'Border' Phenomenon: Thought, Language, Body The problem of border is a defining factor in the cognition of the phenomena of thought, language and body. A significant aspect emerging in this perspective of understanding is the qualitative change of a child¿s consciousness in the situation of growing up to adulthood and experiencing a new relationship with the world and with oneself.

Module: Ethics The course will present the main traditions of Ethical Theory from Plato and Aristotle until Kant and Levinas. The presentation of the ethical theories will follow on a preliminary discussion of to-days ecological crisis, with its fragmentation of the Rational Man paradigm, for instance in economics, politics and the human sciences, and with a view to Dostojevskij¿s criticism of utilitarianism for lack of understanding of man¿s dignity

The students are invited to discuss the relative strength of these theories, and what kind of picture they give us of man¿s dignity and the future survival of mankind. They are also invited to discuss whether or not central elements of these theories may still be regarded as invaluable in order to secure peaceful coexistence in the world of globalization.

Module: Phenomenology as experience of Difference One can understand the event as something that cannot be attributed to any subject, that isn¿t a fact or object. From this point of view the event is a limiting condition the specific integrity of which cannot be divided into subject and predicate. For the first time the analysis of these conditions was given by Aristotle in the ninth book of his Metaphysics and then by the stoics. Therefore the problem of the description of event conducts to the border of language which is consciousness. In this course it is shown that the question of consciousness is the question of the border of language. The main place occupies the analysis of the concept of intentionality which is the corner-stone of Husserl¿s phenomenology. According to the famous definition of consciousness as consciousness of something, the intentionality is a mental act directed towards any object. That definition contains the following distinction: consciousness of an object isn¿t an object of consciousness. That distinction which can be named primordial Difference makes impossible the description of consciousness by language of objects. In turn, a Difference calls in question the language itself forcing to think anew the problem of limits of language.

Module: Critical Thinking The course will start with a critical assessment of deductive, inductive and abductive methods in Science and the Humanities concentrating on four representative case histories. The students are invited to discuss Carl G.Hempel¿s theory of natural science and to comment upon the problems concerning the use of the deductive paradigm in practice. The problems of induction and abduction will be discussed by referring to articles or positions held by Paul Feyerabend, Norwood Russel Hanson and Nelson Goodman. The students are apart from this also invited to strengthen their critical ability by focusing on the semantics of communicative argument. For this purpose selected parts of Arne Naess, Communication and Argument, will be introduced as anl example.

Several case histories from the humaniora will be presented, for instance Kants¿s discovery of the reflective judgement (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Ney York. Haffner 1968.) and Schiller¿s discovery of the ¿melting beauty¿ in (Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Oxford. Claerendon 1979).