David B. Johnson

In this writing-intensive course, students will work to improve their writing skills through an exploration of environmental ethics, the branch of thought devoted to understanding what makes the nonhuman world valuable, how we human beings should conceive of our relation to and role within that world, and what obligations we owe to the beings that populate it. After a brief introduction to philosophical ethics in general, we will study several texts outlining some of the major approaches to environmental ethics, including anthropocentrism, biocentric egalitarianism, and ecofeminism. These readings will be drawn from a range of disciplines, historical eras, and cultural sources. Students will have the opportunity to explore topics of further interest in the field of environmental ethics through their written work, which will make up the bulk of their coursework and will comprise two major essays, amounting to between 20 to 25 pages of formal, revisable writing. Students will also complete several short homework assignments and in-class writing exercises. The overarching goal of the course is to deepen students¿ understanding of and facility with the standards and rigors of evidence-based argumentation and analysis.

First-Year Seminars can be thought of as writing studios: their purpose is to help you develop your academic writing skills by practicing writing, revision, and critique. Each FYS course is organized around a topic that orients students¿ writing practice; the topic of this course is the interpretation of dreams. Dreams have fascinated human beings for a long time. Whether understood as a source of inspiration, a cause for amusement, a glimpse into the soul, a pool of diagnostic information, or an everyday process of cognitive housekeeping, dreams have been regarded by some of history¿s most penetrating thinkers as essential to the project of making sense of ourselves and our place in the world. In this course we will investigate the writings of some eminent interpreters of dreams, and through the writing process we will develop our own interpretations in response to their ideas. Our readings will draw upon ancient and medieval philosophy (Aristotle, Zhuangzi, Augustine), early psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung), and contemporary dream science. In addition to short homework assignments, students will complete two major papers¿a Texts-in-Conversation Essay and a Research Paper¿which will go through multiple rounds of review and revision. Throughout the course, we will focus on strategies and techniques for effective writing, including idea-generation, composition, revision, and argument-construction.

In this course, students will develop the skills they need to recognize and evaluate arguments, wherever they find them: journalistic media, social media, advertising, and even the arts. They'll do this by learning how to identify argument patterns, how to draw out implicit arguments, and how to avoid common mistakes in reasoning, both psychological and formal. Students will primarily learn through guided practice, and through the work of philosophers like Vaughn, Nguyen, and Setiya.

Existentialism has left a profound influence on contemporary Western thought, including philosophy, literature, film, theater, and graphic arts. It is a philosophical movement oriented toward two major themes - the analysis of human existence and the centrality of human choice. Existentialist conceptions of freedom and value arise from their view of the individual. According to Existentialist thinkers we are all ultimately alone, isolated islands of subjectivity in an objective world ,who have absolute freedom over our internal nature. Existentialism traces its roots to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. As a philosophy of human existence, existentialism found its best 20th-century exponent in its foremost representative Albert Camus. Camus believed that the essence of human existence in freedom. He criticized the human tendency toward 'bad faith,' reflected in humanity's perverse attempts to deny its own responsibility and flee from the truth of its inescapable freedom. In this course, we will examine themes of subjectivity, individuality, freedom and meaning that are central to Existentialist philosophy. To arrive at these goals, we will turn to works of philosophy, literature and film. As part of the course we will practice the principles of persuasive writing by learning how to make claims, analyze and make arguments about the works we will be discussing.