Philosophy

From Buddhist almsgiving and Christian fasting to Islamic halal laws and contemporary movements toward vegetarianism and veganism, this course examines how certain food practices articulate broader concerns about purity, taboo, hierarchy, sacrifice, ecology, and embodiment. Drawing on a wide range of religious texts, ethnographic case studies, and critical theory, students will engage with questions of religious identity and ethics to better understand the complex entanglement of food and morality in religious life.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

This introductory course ‘Disciplines Without Borders:’ Multidisciplinarity in Literature, Art, and Sciences will explore the intersections between literary texts, scientific discoveries, and art. We will study Geometry, Calculus, Probability Theory, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Physics, Medicine, and Ecology in Russian Literature. We will read novels, poems, and plays by Goethe, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Akhmatova, and Nabokov, among others, with relevant chapters from Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency by Allen Speight; The Mathematical Mind of F. M. Dostoevsky: Imaginary Numbers, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and Infinity by Michael Marsh-Soloway; Russian Literature and Cognitive Science edited by Tom Dolack, “which applies the newest insights from cognitive psychology to the study of Russian literature;” Medical Storyworlds: Health, Illness, and Bodies in Russian and European Literature at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Elena Fratto; Jeff Love’s studies on Tolstoy’s use of calculus for the development of his philosophy of history, “Tolstoy’s Integration Metaphor from War and Peace” by Stephen T. Ahearn as well as other scientific studies that engage with literature such as Yuriy Mann’s Mathematics as Metaphor, Sarah Hart’s Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature, and Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons in Physics. In addition to the reading materials, assignments will include expository writings as well as philosophical games and illustrations of the connections between science and art, mind and matter. We will also have guest lecturers from the departments of philosophy, mathematics, and cognitive science as we consider philosophy as science and science as art and explore multidisciplinarity and the many ways in which sciences can transform our understanding of art and literature and vice versa. No prerequisites either in humanities or sciences.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

This course is a study of philosophy of history and science primarily through a reading of Leo Tolstoy’s works and his epic War and Peace (1863-69). Over seven years, Tolstoy wrote a massive work that he refused to call a novel—but what was it? War and philosophy are more vital to it than peace or love stories. We entertain the idea that Tolstoy's radical ideas on narrative have a counterpart in his radical ideas on history, causation, freedom and necessity, catastrophe, commitment, and the formation of a moral self. To frame War and Peace and our discussions of philosophy, we will read Jeff Love’s studies on Tolstoy’s use of calculus for the development of his philosophy of history, “Tolstoy’s Integration Metaphor from War and Peace” by Stephen T. Ahearn as well as excerpts from philosophers like Plato, Kant, and Hegel that Tolstoy addresses in his writings. We will also study shorter works by Tolstoy, fictional and non-fictional, written before and after War and Peace, which attempt to answer huge questions with succinct definitions free of irony or reservation: What is war? courage? human experience? family? love? art? faith? death? freedom? Before War and Peace, Tolstoy poses these questions covertly and searchingly. After 1880 he answers them overtly and categorically—so much so that no authoritative text was safe. In this context, we will also read Tolstoy’s philosophical works Confession (1882), On Life (1888), and Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

This course will serve as an introduction to alchemy and its development into modern chemistry beginning with its Greco-Egyptian origins. A strong emphasis of the course will be placed on understanding the philosophy and practice of notable alchemists, such as through their synthesis and pursuit of the mythical ‘philosopher’s stone.’ We will analyze how alchemists of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, like Basil Valentine, Paracelsus, and Isaac Newton, sought to understand the natural world through alchemical theories, experimental methods, symbolic representation, and metaphysical reflections. We will explore the philosophical underpinnings of these alchemical theories, with a focus on the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic influences. Through writing assignments, students will engage critically with texts and alchemical iconography. Finally, the course includes a laboratory component in which we will reproduce alchemical procedures and analyze the products using modern solid-state characterization techniques. This course is intended for students of all majors and backgrounds.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Natural Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

Writing Intensive

The Timaeus is often seen today as one of Plato’s more mysterious and puzzling dialogues. But it was also historically one of his most influential. Its account of creation, the cosmos, and its numerical ordering formed the foundation for considerable work at the junctures of science, mathematics, and philosophy, from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This course will explore the complex and fascinating story told in the Timaeus together with its long-reaching legacy. We will read the dialogue in translation in its entirety as well as select later thinkers who build on its picture of the cosmos and its important mathematical, philosophical, and theological themes.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

The purpose of this course is to ask the most important questions concerning the concept of time. What is time? Does time exist? Is it a fundamental aspect of the cosmos or just an illusion of human perception? Do different cultures, historical periods, or individuals have unique conceptions of time? Or are there universal aspects of time that transcend our differences? Do animals perceive time or is the perception of time a uniquely human phenomenon? Is time travel possible? The history of philosophy, both Western and Eastern, provides an array of different answers to these and other fundamental questions related to time. Additionally, there is much contemporary research on the concept that is entirely original. In the past four decades, time has been a major interdisciplinary theme, often bringing together humanists and scientists fascinated by its paradoxes. The guiding concern of this course will be to diagnose those aspects of time that are most relevant to us. What can we add to what has been written about time? Does our unique place in time—post COVID-19 pandemic, on the verge of a possible Third World War—prepare us in any specific way to examine the concept? The syllabus for the course will juxtapose canonical philosophical texts by some of the greatest thinkers of time with contemporary writings about time. The readings will support a problem-centered approach, exploring different possibilities for understanding the concept of time and different possible solutions for its many difficulties.

Distribution Area: Humanities

What do films and philosophy have in common? Do films express, with their own means, philosophical problems that are relevant to our experience of ourselves and the world we live in? This term we will study such issues with a particular focus on questions of justice, truth, revenge, forgiveness, hope, hate, and fear.

Prerequisite(s): Students who are enrolled in or have completed AS.300.699 are not eligible to take AS.300.399.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Knowing who or what counts as a person seems straightforward, until we consider the many kinds of creatures, objects, and artificial beings that have been granted—or demanded or denied—that status. This course explores recent debates on being a person in culture, law, and philosophy. Questions examined will include: Should trees have standing? Can corporations have religious beliefs? Could a robot sign a contract? Materials examined will be wide-ranging, including essays, philosophy, novels, science fiction, television, film. No special background is required.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This First-Year Seminar will focus on the figure of Socrates. Socrates wrote nothing, so we depend on others for our knowledge of him. We will examine the ways he is portrayed by several different authors, including Plato. We will also examine some other ideas around in his time - some of which were pretty radical - and consider how he may have reacted to them. Finally, we will examine his influence on later thought.

40 years ago, philosopher Harry Frankfurt began his famous essay “On Bullsh*t” by writing “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullsh*t”, and the situation has arguably only gotten worse. We are inundated with bullsh*t—in person, on the news, in politics, and on social media. We’re up to our eyeballs in it.But what is bullsh*t anyway? Frankfurt argued that bullsh*tting is different from lying. While liars aim to mislead us about what’s true, bullsh*tters don’t care whether what they say is true or false at all. They’re playing a different game entirely, using language to aggrandize themselves or, often, to sell you something. This indifference to truth, Frankfurt argued, may make bullsh*t even more corrosive to public discourse than outright lies.This First-Year Seminar will draw on philosophy, cognitive science, and social theory to investigate why bullsh*t is so pervasive and why we fall for it. We will ask whether the human mind is naturally susceptible to bullsh*t, what makes bullsh*t useful, and whose interests it serves. Along the way, we’ll consider the scope of the concept: Is ChatGPT bullsh*t? Are some jobs bullsh*t? Are grades bullsh*t? Hell, is this seminar bullsh*t? By the end, you’ll be in a position to decide. No bullsh*t.

Consciousness is maybe the most mysterious thing in the universe. Why would any hunk of matter—particularly the three pounds of squishy stuff between your ears—feel any particular way? It’s hard even to imagine a satisfying explanation. Recent advances in artificial intelligence are raising this old question in new ways. Machines are smarter than they’ve ever been. If you thought there was a connection between intelligence and consciousness, then would a smart enough machine be conscious? Or is there something special about a biological brain? This First-Year Seminar will investigate human and artificial minds. What is consciousness, and could there be artificial consciousness? Do large language models like ChatGPT have beliefs or desires? What is it about minds that make them the sorts of things we have to care about morally? In exploring these questions, we will draw on philosophy and cognitive science, and learn about how large language models like ChatGPT actually work. We will also consider explorations of these themes in science fiction, and maybe even administer a Turing Test of our own.

This First-Year Seminar will explore diverse aspects of how we see and fail to see the world. We’ll discuss questions such as: What can we learn about vision from illusions and hallucinations? What explains why we sometimes miss things even though we’re looking right at them? Does what we believe and desire affect what we see? What happens to our visual experience when the brain is damaged, for example in conditions such as “blindsight,” “neglect” and “visual form agnosia”? And: Is there such a thing as subliminal or unconscious perception? Though primarily psychological, the course will draw on other disciplines, especially the philosophy of perception. We’ll also think about some of the ways visual artists and magicians exploit the workings of our visual systems to achieve their aims. This will likely involve at least one outing to a local art gallery to look for examples of what we’ve learned, an in-class screening, and hopefully a guest speaker or two.

This First-year Seminar will study the direction of time, pointing from past to future. It will primarily be based on the physics of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, covering aspects of statistical mechanics, probability, and cosmology. But it will also touch on how time's arrow manifests itself in the macroscopic world, including questions of memory, prediction, aging, and causality.

The current paradigm for understanding addiction is a brain disease of compulsion, investigated in large part through animal models. Yet addiction in humans has dimensions of meaning and suffering alike that cannot be captured by neuroscience or modelled in animals. This First-Year Seminar explores addiction by combining what we know from addiction science with what we know from philosophy and the humanities, as well as therapy, journalism, film, and autobiographical narratives. We will work to understand the puzzle of why people use drugs in ways that can come to destroy their lives through these various lenses and without recourse to stigma, dogma, or dehumanization. This interdisciplinary course will develop students' skills in reading, analytic thinking, and writing; we will also visit an animal lab.

Every person has a life to live, but what is this thing, “a life”, that every person has? To begin with, it’s just the temporally extended existence of the person, the proverbial three score and ten. But a person’s life is more than that, because it follows a natural progression of life-stages, from childhood to adolescence to middle age to senescence. And it’s even more still, since it is partly the creation of the person living it, who can plan it, evaluate it, anticipate its future, and remember its past. In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore these and other aspects of a person’s life through works of literature and philosophy. What makes you the same person throughout the different stages of your life? How does the passage of time color your perception of life? What makes for a good life? A meaningful life? Should you be grateful for having been born or dismayed at having to die?

It is difficult to think about the fact that you will die. It is confusing theoretically and it is confusing emotionally. We will be spending the course trying to think our way through the confusions. On the theoretical side, thinking about the fact that you will die raises a cluster of philosophical questions. What are you? Are you necessarily the sort of thing that ceases to exist when your biological life ends? What is it that connects you to your childish self and makes some person in the future you? And does the fact that you die diminish the value of your life? If it means the end of your existence, does it make life absurd, or meaningless, or only more precious? We will address these questions as well as whether death should be feared, whether death is bad, and whether immortality would be desirable.Being confronted with the fact of your death can also help focus questions about how you should live. It presses you to think about what makes life worth living? What makes a life meaningful? Are there objective answers to what makes a life meaningful, or is this a personal choice? If meaningfulness involves some kind of overarching project (e.g., achieving something, leaving something behind, participating in something larger than ourselves) is meaningfulness worth pursuing, or should we instead throw off the tyranny of purposes and just live?These are the things we will be talking about over the course of the semester.

More than 500 federally-recognized Native tribes and many more who are not federally recognized live within the borders of the United States. Each of these communities has its own history, identity, traditions, relationship to the land, and story of survivance. This First-Year Seminar examines the views of Indigenous communities on topics such as truth, knowledge, identity and the self, causation, and ethics. It also investigates contemporary American Indian thought as it relates to colonialism and anti-colonialism, land, futurity, sovereignty, and resistance. Students will hear from guest lecturers working at the forefront of the discipline and enrich their learning through a trip to the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

A survey of major developments in American philosophy, literature, law, economics, and political theory since 1865. Among other subjects, readings will explore modernism and anti-modernism, belief and uncertainty, science and tradition, uniformity and diversity, scarcity and surfeit, and individualism and concern for the social good.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

That the nations of the world could ever work together seems utopian, but also unavoidable: migration, war, and not least climate change make some form of global coordination increasingly necessary. This course will give historical and philosophical depth to the idea of a cosmopolitan order and world peace by tracing it from its ancient sources through early modernity to today. At the center of the course will be the text that has been credited with founding the tradition of a world federation of nations, Immanuel Kant’s "Toward Perpetual Peace" (1795). Confronting recent and current political discourse, literature, and philosophy with Kant’s famous treatise, we will work to gain a new perspective on the idea of a world order. In addition to Kant, readings include Homer, Erasmus, Pico della Mirandola, Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Emily Dickinson, Tolstoy, Whitman, Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King as well as lesser-known authors such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Ellen Key, Odette Thibault, Simone Weil, and Claude Lefort. Taught in English.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Despotism, authoritarianism, autocracy, dictatorship: the terms for tyranny are legion. But what exactly do we mean by tyranny, and how are we to understand it? This seminar will explore what literature, philosophy, and political theory, ancient and modern, have to say about both this (protean) concept and its many historically charged avatars. A deeper look into the history of “tyranny” reveals unexpected complexities, from affirmative uses of the term to radical critiques. To better understand this complex history and what it is we mean when we oppose political repression today, we will read classic works from political theory, philosophy, and literature (e.g. Plato’s “Apology of Socrates,” “Republic” VIII-IX; Xenophon’s “Hiero”; Livy’s “Ab Urbe Condita” 1-2; Seneca the Younger’s “De Clementia”), early modern (e.g. Machiavelli’s “Prince”; La Boétie’s “On Voluntary Servitude”; Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”; Schiller’s “Fiesco”) and modern works (e.g. Strauss on Xenophon, followed by Kojève’s Commentary; Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism”).

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this course, we will examine the evolution of the modern hermeneutic tradition, from textual hermeneutics to philosophical hermeneutics, in relation to a range of posthermeneutic approaches to the study of literature, concerning questions of media, materiality, affect, and presence. We will consider how “post”-hermeneutics is not simply anti- or non-hermeneutic, but rather in complex dialog with hermeneutics, and is inscribed into the modern hermeneutic tradition since the late 18th century. Throughout the semester, we will return to a selection of literary works that serve as case studies with which to apply the theoretical and philosophical frameworks examined. Readings may include works by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Sontag, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Friedrich Kittler, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Brian Massumi, among others.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course explores the link between the transgression of the symbolic order in psychosis and the transcendence of discrete mental acts in transcendental philosophy to arrive at thought’s foundation. We will begin the course with the analysis of selected texts by Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Freud and Lacan with attention to the parallels between the psychoanalytic account of bliss in transgression and the idealist account of freedom in thinking. The remainder of the course will be devoted to the examination of literary works by Virginia Woolfe, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser and Daniel Paul Schreber.

This course considers the importance of philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and other humanist approaches to ecology and environmental issues.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

What does it mean to exist, and to be able to reflect on this fact? What is it mean to be a self? This course explores the themes of existentialism in literature and philosophy, including the meaning of existence, the nature of the self, authenticity and inauthenticity, the inescapability of death, the experience of time, anxiety, absurdity, freedom and responsibility to others. It will be examined why these philosophical ideas often seem to demand literary expression or bear a close relation to literary works. Readings may include writings by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Rilke, Kafka, Simmel, Jaspers, Buber, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Daoud.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

The advent of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore how much we have taken the idea of thinking for granted in the past fifty years. This course will trace the development of the notion of mind in ancient Greece through the exploration of consciousness in eighteenth-century German thought and physiological explanations of thought beginning with Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. We will compare these historical accounts to the statistical models and neural network theories that dominate today. We will also read a selection of short(er) literary works in which the question of who, or what, is speaking brings the traditional aesthetic concept of mimesis into contact with mimetic theory in machine learning.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Nature and Ecology in German Literature and Thought examines the representation of the natural world and ecological thinking in literary works and aesthetic theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Themes include the aesthetics of nature, poetic reverence for nature, anthropocentric depictions of nature, the thematization of landscape, the representation of animal life and environment, the impact of technology, urbanization, and industrialization on our sense of nature. Readings may include works from poetry, novels, or short fiction and fairy tale, as well as philosophy and theory. Readings may include poetry by Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and WG Sebald, fairy tales or Märchen by the brothers Grimm, and fiction by Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Horst Sternn and Christa Wolf, along with theoretical works by Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jakob von Uexküll, Hans Jonas, and Gernot Böhme, and contemporary German ecocriticism. The course is taught in English with texts in English translation; German speakers will be invited to use original texts.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

This course critically engages the presentation and imagination of animals and other non-human life in modern literature, philosophy, and thought. We will examine the figure of the animal and the means of conceptual differentiation between the animal and the human, considering animals' relation to or perceived exclusion from language, pain, embodiment, sexuality, and the visual gaze. The course is ideal for students interested in fascinating themes in literature and how they reflect philosophical concerns. No prior courses in philosophy are required. Students will read philosophical texts alongside literary works in learning the conceptual history of animals and of humanity as a distinct species. Expect fascinating readings and engaging, lively discussions. Readings may include works by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger Derrida, Agamben, Poe, Kleist, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Pirandello, and Coetzee.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

This course will trace the tensions, antagonisms, and collaborations between poetry and philosophy as distinctive but fundamental expressions of human thought and experience. We will engage poetry as a form of artistic expression that compliments, completes, or challenges other forms of knowledge, and consider the range of philosophy's responses to poetry and poetics. Readings will include works by philosophical poets and poetic philosophers including Hölderlin, Schlegel, Rilke, Bachmann, Celan, Stevens, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Valéry, Wittgenstein, and Agamben.

The first volume of Husserl’s Ideas I (1913) provides an overarching picture of the phenomenological method that came to define much twentieth-century German and French thought. This course will consider the foundational concepts introduced in this volume (eidetic analysis, intentionality, bracketing, correlationism, time consciousness, the natural attitude and the phenomenological reduction) as well as responses to them by Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Heidegger and others. We will also consider Husserl’s later efforts to incorporate history, other minds, and even that which is other-than-mind into his idealist system.

We will study key passages of The Phenomenology of Spirit from a queer-feminist and a literary perspective and engage with scholarship on Hegel that is pertinent to these approaches.

Distribution Area: Humanities

One of the greatest works of literature of all times, the Divine Comedy leads us down into the torture-pits of Hell, up the steep mountain terrain of Purgatory, through the “virtual” space of Paradise, and then back to where we began: our own earthly lives. We accompany Dante on his journey, building along the way knowledge of medieval Italian history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion. The course also focuses on the arts of reading deeply, asking questions of a text, and interpreting literary and scholarly works through discussion and critical writing. Conducted in English. For undergraduate students only.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

Existentialism, a powerful movement in modern drama and theatre, has had a profound influence on contemporary political thought, ethics, and psychology, and has transformed our very notion of how to stage a play. Selected readings and lectures on the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre -- and discussion of works for the stage by Sartre, Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Albee, Pinter, and the late plays of Caryl Churchill. Opportunities for projects on central European Absurdism in works by Dürrenmatt, Havel, Witkiewicz, and Mrozek. Students may also choose to examine post-colonialism in the work of Frantz Fannon and second-wave feminism in essays by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre's long-time collaborator.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

This course focuses on a powerful current in theater and thought from ancient works to the modern day: plays that self-consciously use the means of theater, such as a play-within-the-play, to represent the world. This type of play, along with its close relative, the Dream Play, traces its origin more to Plato and his motif of the Theatrum Mundi (the theater of the world/the world as theater) than to Aristotelian mimesis (the imitation of reality), and poses an alternative to the realist tradition. An ancient, alternate modality, this non-realistic line is also a modern one, recurring throughout history. By the 20th century, this “secret smuggler’s path” becomes a dominant language for theater itself, posing an alternate dialectics, an alternate metaphysics, an alternate hermeneutics for our ability to understand reality as well as illusion. This course—which lies at the intersection of both disciplines—will be cross listed between Theatre Arts and Philosophy. We will read plays from across histories as well as philosophical and theoretical texts, unearthing surprising correspondences in the two overlapping (Shakespeare would say "undistinguishable") fields.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)