Honors Seminars - Spring 2009
Honors 181, Section 41 “Literature and Science from Revolution to Evolution”
Professor Dahlia Porter, Department of English TR 9:35-10:50 316 Buttrick
From the sixteenth century to the 21st, literary writing has been a conduit for the dissemination of scientific ideas, as well as a place in which these ideas are contested, evaluated, and reinterpreted. Literature plays both advocate and critic: If Coleridge claimed that chemistry was "poetry realized in nature," in Shelley’s Frankenstein it produced the most unnatural of beings. In this course, we'll ask how and why literary writers engaged with science of their day: Why did they feel impelled to promote or quarrel with science? What made science so attractive or disturbing to them? How did their depictions impact the public reception of science? To answer these questions, we'll examine a broad historical spectrum of literary representations of science, paying particular attention to the way they respond to 1. specific scientific concepts; 2. the increasing separation between disciplines; and 3. the growing authority of science in western culture. We’ll read poetry and fiction by John Donne, Jonathan Swift, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, and Robert Browning. We’ll also give careful attention to women’s engagement scientific developments in works by Anne Finch, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, and Andrea Barrett. Topics will include: the “two cultures” debate; scientific revolutions; Newton's optics; Romantic botany and chemistry; epidemics and the literature of plague; “deep time” and evolutionary theory.
AXLE: Humanities and the Creative Arts
Honors 182, Section 15 “Neuroethics”
Professor Jeff Schall, Department of Psychology TR 2:35-3:50 308 Buttrick
As the discoveries made in neuroscience laboratories are being applied in legal, business and educational domains, unprecedented ethical questions are surfacing. Issues include physical
enhancement of performance and personality, brain-reading for diagnosis or conviction, brain interventions for educational or legal reasons. For example, some have sought to use information about the neural basis of decision making through neuro-marketing. Consequently, neuro-ethics has become a popular and important topic; indeed, The President's Council on Bioethics has devoted attention to these questions. This course will consist of directed readings and group discussions.
AXLE: Perspectives
Honors 182, Section 17 “Environmental Philosophy”
Professor David Wood, Department of Philosophy TR 1:10-2:25 217 Furman
Man's place in Nature has been discussed since the beginning of human history. We are ourselves natural beings: we eat, drink and breathe to stay alive, and we are also mortal, vulnerable and sexual beings. But as well as our human nature within, there is Nature outside. Nature sustains us (natural resources) and threatens us (natural disasters). The explosive growth of technology has lead to a sharpening of these tensions. Pollution, world hunger, global warming, nuclear waste and other hazards threaten to turn the earth from a paradise into a hell - the "late great planet earth". Major ethical and broader philosophical problems are raised by this crisis: sustainable development, species preservation, global justice, animal rights, biodiversity and so on. We think of Nature as 'out there', but the shape of this 'out there' is determined by our images and theories of Nature, shaped throughout history by religion, art, myth and philosophical reflection. Contemporary radical movements - including land ethic, ecofeminism, deep ecology have sought to reshape these images. This course will provide a basis for critical reflection on these vital questions. I hope to be able to use art, literature, poetry and film in addition to core philosophical teachings.
AXLE: Perspectives
Honors183, Section 35 “Religion, Politics and Culture in Post-reformation England”
Professor Peter Lake, Department of History MW 1:10-2:25 1313 Stevenson
The reformation both in England and in western Europe more generally created a political and cultural scene dominated by the fact of confessional division. As the disagreements between Protestants and Catholics, and indeed those between different groups within the two main confessional blocs widened into institutional and ecclesiastical, polemical and political, permanence, enormous pressure was placed upon existing norms concerned with the relation between the political and the religious, church and state, and the need for religious agreement as an absolute precondition for political and social order. The course examines how the resulting strains and tensions were handled (or not) in post reformation England. It will use a broad range of contemporary sources and genres; plays and pamphlets, as well as tracts and more formal works of polemic and theory, to examine the impact of religious division on politics and culture and in particular the shifting and increasingly problematic relationship between politics and religion in the period down to the English civil war.
AXLE: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Honors 185, Section 07 “Attention”
Professor Gordon Logan, Department of Psychology TR 1:10-2:25 519 Wilson
This course is intended to provide a survey of experimental psychology from the perspective of research on the phenomena of attention. Attention is a central concept in all domains of psychology, including cognition, neuroscience, emotion, development, psychopathology, social and individual differences, so a survey of research on attention is also a survey of psychology as a whole. The course will survey these topics in a series of classroom discussions and laboratory exercises. Students will read original papers on attentional phenomena and participate in laboratory demonstrations of those phenomena.
AXLE: Mathematics & Natural Science
Honors185, Section 09 “Perception of Control”
Professor Adriane Seiffert, Department of Psychology MW 1:10-2:25 117 Memorial
Most of the time, we take for granted that we can see, grasp and manipulate objects in our environment. Holding the pen to take notes in class is effortless. Watching how the pen marks the page is simple. Moving the pen to write is so easy that we often forget it is an
acquired skill. In a more challenging environment, however, such as skiing down a steep slope or contesting for the ball in a sport, the demands of attending, acting and controlling objects become clear.
In this seminar, we will investigate the cognitive and neuroscience basis for these abilities by exploring how they are used in different environments. We will ask fundamental questions about how these mental faculties interact. Are attention and intention separable quantities? Do we decide to attend to objects or is attention obligatory? Why do we ever attend differently than we intend? Do we have free will when acting upon objects in our environment or are we just experiencing our behavior post-hoc? How do we determine whether we are in control of an object or not? Is our perception of control valid or biased? Students are encouraged to
learn about the science by drawing on case studies and philosophies of their own choosing and to express their opinions and summarize issues in their writing.
AXLE: Mathematics and Natural Science
Honors186, Section 06 “Politics of Poverty”
Professor Jon Hiskey, Department of Political Science MW 2:35-3:50 1313 Stevenson
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. - - Adam Smith
The deification of the market is nothing other than the product of a development of national capital onto international levels, breaking down its physical barriers. . . In this way the globalization of the economy is just the concentration of value created by world society in the multinationals. That is to say the upward fusion of productive, financial, and banking capital. - - Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement
Is development really as simple as Adam Smith makes it out to be? If so, why are there so many very poor countries, and so few countries that have reached the “highest degree of opulence” in today’s world? Is it the case, as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement has argued, that the forces of globalization in today’s world are such that poor countries will never be able to develop? If so then how do we explain the many dramatic development success stories around the world in recent decades? We have two primary goals for this course. First, we will examine the tremendous disparities in wealth that exist among the nations of the world today and evaluate the various answers offered by scholars to the question of why such disparities exist. The foci of these answers range from the international economic system to the values and beliefs of the individuals within developing societies.
AXLE: International Cultures
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