To help sort through and piece together some fragments of that great puzzle, the Penn Humanities Forum organized a full calendar of classes, seminars, exhibits, and public lectures on human nature this academic year. The program allowed humanists as well as artists and natural and social scientists to discuss what it means to be human from the differing perspectives of their disciplines. There are huge changes going on right now in genetics and in evolutionary psychology that really are changing people's ideas about human nature and making people think a lot more about what it means to be human. On the other hand, just saying 'human nature' begs the question of how it's to be understood. What we study, by and large, are differences among people.
Literature is a good example of a discipline that probes the importance of differences.
More than asserting a prickly political correctness, humanists maintain that categories like gender, class, race, and sexuality are integral facets of individual identity. Casting the light of scholarship through those prisms reveals that individuals experience their lives and what it means to be human in substantially different ways. Often those differences are played out in relationships where one group wields power while another is bowed beneath it. The human adventure, needless to say, is a different experience for those living at opposite ends of the power equation. Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, has taught at Penn since 1979.