An interdisciplinary first-year seminar focused on fostering student inquiry and developing skills in critical reading, thinking, and writing.
| Distribution Area | Prerequisites | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 course |
Our study of the imagery of ruin and re-begetting will allow us to explore a triple theme--creation, destruction, and re-creation--and to consider how language conveys the human attempt to counter fragmentation, chaos, or oblivion. Reading works by Plato, Shakespeare, Donne, Woolf, Jones, Kingsolver, and others, we will explore the longing to triumph over transience, destruction, and death. I hope that throughout this semester you will find that words matter--not only in the texts you read, but also in your own writing--and that as you hone an argument and polish your prose, you will take pleasure in your own creations.
Demokratia, the idea that people have the power to rule themselves, took root in ancient Greece in the 6th century BCE. Underlying this movement were the principles of freedom, equality, and justice. Those same principles provided the conceptual foundations for modern democracies beginning with the United States in the late 18th century. Yet, now in the third decade of the 21st century, democracy as a viable political system is threatened all over the globe.
In this course we will take a deep dive into the past. Through the discipline of archaeology, which brings together evidence from excavation, works of art, and ancient texts, we will explore the origins of democratic thought and the institutions that those ideas created. From the early Greek poets and playwrights, such as Homer and Aeschylus, to historians and philosophers, such as Thucydides and Plato, we will consider what liberty, equality, and justice meant in a society that restricted citizenship, excluded women from participation in politics, and in which a significant part of the population was enslaved. Through careful study and analysis of the monuments of the Athenian Agora and Acropolis, we will look at how visual rhetoric reinforces particular political ideologies. Most importantly, we will ask, what did Demokratia mean in the ancient Mediterranean world, and to what extent is contemporary democracy dependent on that past? By examining Democracy's past, this course will grapple with its present and consider its future.
Humans are amazing learners but obviously have major limitations in how effectively we acquire new knowledge and skills and how competently we apply them to new situations. In this course, we will examine knowledge and skills transfer from a broad variety of perspectives, e.g., what are the most efficient strategies for learning according to cognitive science, to what extent do qualities like curiosity, passion, and critical thinking apply across contexts in our lives, how do cognition and emotion compete and cooperate to produce our decisions and behaviors, can human learning and machine learning be effectively synthesized in a world suffused with AI, and should higher education and work cultures evolve in certain ways to better accommodate human strengths and weaknesses?