Prerequisites: None.

 

Course Description:

In the humanities we explore some of the most important ideas that individual minds have conceived from antiquity to our own day, in order to question and understand human society, past and present. The humanities, then, is comprised of those academic disciplines concerned with the study of the human condition (i.e. with what it means to be human). In this course we shall undertake to do a systematic reading of a number of texts in relation to the following topics: the articulation of competing versions of moral choice; the relationship of reason to the realm of the emotions; the relationship of the public to the private sphere; the meaning of self-hood; and the relationship of the individual to the family, the community, the state, to nature and to God.

 

Required Texts:

 

Sophocles, Antigone

Aristotle, Ethics

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

Pascal, Pensées

Thomas More, Utopia

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

 

Course Requirements:

Participation　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 15%

Quizzes　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 10%

Three 3-page papers　 (15% each)　　 45%

Final Exam　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 30%