We live in a moment of profound anxiety about the degradation of our attention spans, with constant conversations about “the attention economy,” the commodification of attention, and the destruction of attention through smartphones. While these concerns feel particularly acute right now, Western philosophy has struggled with the value of attention and dangers of distraction from the beginning, when Plato, in his allegory of the cave, dramatized our distraction from the pursuit of truth by the play of shadows on the cave wall.
In this course, we will take up key thinkers in the Western religious and philosophical tradition in order to interrogate the meaning, value, and ends of attention. If attention is important to living a good life, what is the nature of the good we are pursuing? What is lost if we lose the ability to attend? Is attention the foundation of ethics? Are there different types of attention? In pursuing these questions, we will read thinkers worried about the problem of attention in contexts as different as the distracting excitement of gladiatorial games, the “noonday demon” that bred lethargy in early Christians, the focus needed to study a difficult math problem, and the encounter with the destitute. Our readings will include Plato, Augustine, the Desert Church Father, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch, among others.
