Course “One and a Half Natures of the Human Being.” Impressions.

I went to the course “One and a Half Natures of the Human Being” primarily because my favorite block in the ecology course was the one dedicated to humans. This topic interested me back in my third year, and it was a pity that we devoted so little time to it. I really liked the idea of interdisciplinary courses — it is great when you can attend a course from a specialist on what interests you, regardless of the faculty you study at. In my opinion, a course like “One and a Half Natures of the Human Being” can interest everyone, because it is always interesting to understand one’s own nature. As a result, most listeners were biologists, and several psychologists also attended. On the one hand, that is a pity; on the other hand, with a different audience, the first lectures might have had to be spent proving that humans are animals, which would have consumed valuable time. Time already felt insufficient. More or less active discussions appeared only in the last few classes, when we began listening to reviews of the books we had read. I would have liked those discussions to be less compressed, with perhaps two class periods per book to analyze controversial points and weak arguments. However, despite Dmytro Andriyovych’s efforts, we were not always ready for that. This course is not a set of factual data or a limited required body of knowledge. It is about developing an ability to think in a particular way, perceiving familiar things through the prism of biological context. That is engaging and addictive. Some facts are certainly present — they surprise and fuel interest even more. But such courses should mainly be perceived through development of a specific thinking style. A good exercise for this is analysis of thematic literature. That is exactly what we were invited to do in the second half of the course. When the list of recommended books appeared on the site (https://batrachos.com/1_5_nature_library), my eyes ran wide — the book titles gave no peace; I wanted to download everything at once and start reading. It was very difficult to choose. Probably it would have been easier if titles had been accompanied by short annotations...