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THINK 7: Journeys

Is death final or only the beginning of another journey? How do the mysteries of destination give rise to our most basic questions of purpose, meaning, and faith, and challenge us to consider our proper relation to others?nnn nnJourneys will examine works written across a span of some 2,300 years, from Chinese philosophy to American short stories. Each of these forms and genres presents some essential aspect of the journey we all share, and of the various passages we make within that one great journey that relentlessly challenge and transform us even as we advance toward what the poet Thomas Gray called our "inevitable hour." By reading, discussing, and interpreting these works, we will ask you to consider how each text compels us, by the penetration of its vision and the power of its art, to make part of our own journey in its company.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER

THINK 8: Sustainability and Collapse

What does it mean to live sustainably? How do our different definitions of nature ¿ scientific, literary, cultural, and historical ¿ shape the way we answer that question? nnnSustainability and Collapse will explore what people in different places and periods of time have envisioned as successful ways of living with nature and how such ways of life have come under pressure. We will focus particularly on the interface between scientific and humanistic approaches to questions of environmental sustainability through a study of novels, historical texts, and works of biogeography. You will learn to ask how textual and visual images inform our ideas about what it means to live sustainably. We will then consider whether those ideas are in accordance with or in conflict with scientific understandings of human uses of nature. This course takes on some of the fundamental problems that presently confront our global community.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II

THINK 9: Technological Visions of Utopia

How do science and technology shape the frameworks for imagining utopian or dystopian societies? nnnSir Thomas More gave a name to the philosophical ideal of a ¿good society¿ ¿ a word that is now a part of common language: utopia. In the almost 500 years since More¿s Utopia appeared, changes in society ¿ including enormous advances in science and technology ¿ have opened up new possibilities for the utopian society that More and his predecessors could not have envisioned. At the same time science and technology also entail risks that suggest more dystopian scenarios ¿ in their most extreme form, threats to humanity¿s very survival. We will look at several works that consider how literary visions of society have evolved with the progress of science and technology. The readings begin with More and include examples of more technologically determined visions of the late 20th century, as imagined in works of fiction.
Terms: Aut | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER

THINK 14: From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe: Science, Philosophy and Religion

How and why did the Copernican revolution in astronomy ¿ which placed the Sun at the center of the solar system rather than the earth ¿ have such a profound effect on the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion? How did it ultimately lead to the secularization of modern society?nnnThis course examines the defining moments when western science, philosophy, and religion became disentangled from one another, eventually leading to the development of our modern secular culture. As background for understanding the Copernican revolution and its aftermath, we begin with a brief examination of Plato and Aristotle, and how these two Ancient Greek thinkers were later taken up in the medieval period, resulting in a synthesis in which science, philosophy, and religion were intimately interconnected. Against this background we will then focus on the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and encounter thinkers who during their lifetimes defied easy categorization: Were Galileo and Newton philosophers or scientists? What about Descartes and Leibniz? In reading texts that we now understand as belonging to one or the other category, we will see how the two disciplines eventually became sharply distinguished from one another ¿ which then led, in turn, to the modern separation between science and religion.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II

THINK 20: Ultimate Meanings: The Stories Buddhists Tell

Does human existence have some ultimate meaning or purpose? What are we here for, and how should we live our lives? Can the stories used by the world¿s religions help us answer these questions? nnnFor a religion which teaches that we have no selves, Buddhism has produced many great stories with many great characters. In this course students will read and think about some of these stories, drawn from the Buddhist tradition in the many forms which it developed as it spread across Asia. We will look at the biography of the founder, the Buddha, the tales of his previous lives, the stories of his disciples, and of later saints and heroes, religious practitioners and ordinary folk. In reading these stories we will investigate how they elaborate a persuasively constructed world of meaning in terms of which people can make sense of their own personal histories, and from which they can learn how to lead a good and meaningful life.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER

THINK 21: Folklore and Literature in Russia and Beyond: Vampires, Talking Cats, and Frog Princesses

What is ¿folklore¿ and what is its purpose? How do we decide if something is authentically ¿folk¿ and does it matter? Why are Eastern Europe and Russia associated with the idea of folklore?nnnFor the past two centuries, elite writers, composers, and artists have found inspiration in the stories, songs, and beliefs of their grandparents, their servants (or their slaves), and their neighbors. This class asks what ¿folklore¿ means and what purposes ¿ political and philosophical as well as artistic ¿ it can serve. We begin with examples from around the world: the German Brothers Grimm as well as the Americans Alan and John Lomax. Then we turn to Eastern Europe and the role it has played in the Western European and American imagination as the home of the archaic and the authentic, from the vampires of Transylvania to the oral epics of the Bosnian Serbs to the nostalgic idea of the Jewish shtetl to the fantasy of Soviet communism as a survival of a pre-capitalist order. Students will analyze both folk and elite texts, and will experiment with gathering oral texts and transforming them just as the writers we study did.
Terms: Win | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE

THINK 24: Evil

What is evil? Are we naturally good or evil? How should we respond to evil?nnThere are many books and courses that focus on the good life or the virtues. Yet despite their obvious apparent presence in our life and world, evil and the vices are rarely taken as explicit topics. We will read philosophical and literary texts that deal with the question of evil at an abstract level and then use other readings that help us focus on more practical implications of the meaning and consequences of evil. By exploring the issue of evil, we will confront larger questions about the nature of humans, the responsibility to address evil as a society, and the moral and ethical ways we might begin to define what is evil.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-ER, College

THINK 28: Media and Message

How do different media embody information? What are the implications for the ways we understand the world and our place in it?nnVisual media are conduits for information and narrative but are experienced very differently. We will explore a range of historical and contemporary media, with an emphasis on the ways that different media present, organize, and structure information as forms that are ¿read¿ or experienced. You will be asked to compare, for example, how different media explore the same or similar content: examples might be viewing the film version of Hellboy as compared to reading the comic book, or considering how a historical event such as the D-Day landings is understood differently via photography, film, and interactive games. We start with considerations of the illuminated book, print, painting, and photography and move to the more recent cinema, television, and interactive and computational media.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: THINK, WAY-A-II, College

THINK 31: Reimagining America: Cultural Memory and Identity Since the Civil War

We will focus on how Americans negotiated issues of cultural memory and national identity through a close analysis of historical texts, novels, poems, films, paintings, cartoons, photographs, and music. Our interpretations will foreground the particular themes of race and nationhood; freedom and citizenship; and changing notions of individual and collective identity. Our assumption in this course is that history is not available to us as a set of events - fixed, past, and unchanging. Rather, history is known through each generation's interpretations of those events, and these interpretations are shaped by each generation's lived experience. What stories get told? Whose? And in what ways? The stories we choose to tell about the past can shape not only our understanding of the present, but also the kind of future we can imagine and strive to realize.
Last offered: Spring 2013 | UG Reqs: College, THINK, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP

THINK 41: The Conscious Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Consciousness, Memory, and Personal Identity

How do our common-sense conceptions of the mind and of ourselves hold up against the growing body of psychological and neurobiological knowledge of the brain? How is your mental life anchored to your physical self?nnYou wake up from a dreamless sleep and suddenly everything's buzzing with color and sound. Somehow your brain sustains this rich landscape of experience, integrating it with a repertoire of memories to constitute yourself. This course probes the neurobiological bases of these familiar yet miraculous facets of the mind. You'll learn to analyze primary philosophical and scientific texts, using basic knowledge of the brain to assess and even innovate experiments that could shed light on the nature of consciousness and personal identity.
Terms: Spr | Units: 4 | UG Reqs: WAY-SMA, THINK, WAY-A-II, College
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