Herman Stark

This course emphasizes, in keeping with First Year Seminar I courses in general, student writing and rewriting. Students will achieve both content and form for their writing by a close reading of texts and critical thinking about them, and then by considered review of feedback from the other seminar members. As is normal in seminars, student presentations occupy a significant amount of class time. In particular, this course confronts death, along with related phenomena such as aging, dying, grieving, and bereavement, in both interdisciplinary and intercultural manners. The direction of study will move from death as a biomedical event thru religious, spiritual, and existential events, and conclude with postmodern possibilities such as cryonics and mind-uploading. A key concern is whether, and to what extent, one?s attitude and approach to death informs one?s attitude and approach to life. The course utilizes various classical and contemporary texts to help expand and enrich our understanding, and each week students will provide thoughtful and polished reports on the assigned readings from them. By the end of the semester students will have written 15-20 pages of formal, revised writing in the form of weekly seminar reports, a midterm paper, and a final paper.

This intense writing course fosters college-level writing skills at a level suitable for upper level Liberal Arts courses. Various types of essays will be executed (e.g., analysis, comparison and contrast) over a number of drafts. As for content, the course targets two aesthetic and philosophical phenomena: the critical and the fine. These phenomena can appear apart (e.g., critical thinking apart from the fine can lead to cynicism and even misology), but they can, in synthesis, produce both philosophy and art of the highest order. M. Gelven's text, The Quest for the Fine, and J. Lynch's The English Language, provide examples from philosophy, art, and language that illustrate paradigmatic syntheses of the critical and the fine. We'll consider, for example, the following distinction: The active voice lends crispness to your writing...but the passive voice works well when the action is more relevant than the person or thing doing the action. By reviewing such instances of grammatical and syntactical precision, across different topics, we will develop our internal sense of the fine. As for the critical, consider the following line by Emily Dickinson: 'Because I could not stop for death...he kindly stopped for me....' It takes the critical touch of a master poet to insert kindly; why, after all, kindly? Do not humans tend to flee death? Is not death a topic to be avoided? Do not many of us rather wish, sometimes idly and sometimes fervently, that we could live forever, or at least longer than we do? Or, has the poet revealed an ambiguity in how one might really feel, and think, about one's mortality? In this seminar, we will learn to make and appreciate such examples in writing, and indeed in writing that displays a heightened criticality and a heightened sense of the fine. Fine and critical writing is expected each week in weekly seminar reports, and over the entire semester in four essays, resulting in 20-25 pages of formal, revised writing.

This course familiarizes students with basic philosophical skills: clear reasoning, examination of the soundness and validity of arguments, and development of consistent positions on certain philosophical issues. The course may be organized historically by studying the thought of major philosophers, beginning with Plato, and ending with the modern era (examples of figures studied: Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, and Nietzsche); thematically (studying major themes in philosophy such as free will and determinism, the existence of God, and the mind-body problem); or by school of thought (studying major trends in philosophy such as pragmatism, analytical philosophy, Marxism, existentialism, and phenomenology). Readings range from historical to contemporary sources, including the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Quine, and Rorty. Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.

Is there any role for philosophy and religion given the advancement of science? This and related questions motivate the course. We explore them by drawing on mythology, fiction, science fiction, poetry, religion, science, and philosophy. We first explore major world religions by studying their texts, doctrines, rituals, and traditions. The aim is to master core facts and dispel stereotypes. Next, we critically examine some key elements, assumptions, and implications of these religions, including religious language, the self, religious psychology, evil, artificial intelligence, and even time travel. Authors include J.J.C. Smart, David Lewis, John Hick, John Perry, Thomas Nagle, David Hume, Xenophanes, Aquinas, Richard Feynman, Ursula Le Guin, Larry Niven, Aldous Huxley, Emily Dickinson, Yasunari Kawabata, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Hermann Hesse. Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly (daily for Summer semester) reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.

This course examines both the explanation and justification of central concepts and ideas in political thought. These include, but are not confined to, the nature and scope of political (governmental) authority in its various forms (e.g., democracy, monarchy, and dictatorship), social contract theories, citizenship, nationalism, cultural pluralism, political obligations, civil disobedience, revolutions, and terrorism. Readings range from historical to contemporary sources, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, Rawls, Dworkin, and Nozick. Assignments vary, but they might include some or many of the following: weekly reading responses, quizzes, papers, and exams.