By “a history of mind,” I mean a history of thinking about the mind.  Is it embodied, inspired, dispersed?  How do minds understand each other?  How do they shape their environments, including their cultural environments, and how are they shaped by them in turn?  To find out how good minds from the past explored these questions, we will read Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book X; Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding; Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” and selections from The Interpretation of Dreams; all interspersed with various poems and commentaries from different eras.  This course will give you a foundation for thinking about more particular histories of mind on topics like creativity, love, play, and madness.