Fall 2024 Course Descriptions
What is Happiness? Boethius at 1500: Middle Ages (GTX 3320)
Dr. Sarah Jane Murray - MW 2:30 - 3:45
In 524 AD, Boethius was condemned to death by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. In prison, awaiting execution, he composed his treatise on human happiness and flourishing, the Consolation of Philosophy. As we celebrate the historic 1500th anniversary of the Consolation in 2024 with this special-edition seminar, deep-dive into the big questions about what it means to be human, explore Boethius’s place in the transmission of learning from the ancient to the medieval world, and join the eternal quest for wisdom. (Students who have already taken GTX 3320 and graduate students may register using a GTX 4V99 course code.)
Black Intellectual Traditions (GTX 3332)
Dr. Jonathan Tran - TR 9:30 - 10:45
Using “Wittgenstein’s vision of language” as a way into thinking through tradition and interpretation, this course inculcates students into the Black Intellectual Tradition from the classical era (e.g., Douglass, Washington, Dubois, Wells, etc.) to Black Marxism (e.g., Cox, James, Baldwin, Hall, etc.) and the contemporary period (e.g., Gilmore, Gilroy, Coates), concluding by reading Plato’s Republic as part of the Black Intellectual Tradition.
Great Texts in the Origins of Science (GTX 3343)
Dr. Eric Martin - MW 4:00 - 5:15
If humans have always sought to understand the world, what is distinctive about the methods, philosophies, or institutions that developed from antiquity to the Early Modern period that we recognize today as “science”? What characterizes scientific inquiry, and does science have the ultimate authority to pronounce on matters of reality? How were religious world views entwined in the beginnings of scientific thought, and has science now superseded religious understanding? This course will investigate such questions through engagement with primary texts in the origins of science, including selections from Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Boyle. The class will help students navigate difficult questions about science’s multifaceted history, its place in society, and its philosophical significance.
Great Texts in Business: Wealth, Success, and the Imagination (GTX 3351)
Dr. Michael Stegemoller - TR 2:00 - 3:15 or 3:30 - 4:45
In this course, we will read and discuss some of the great texts that address questions of business and commercial life. These texts may include historical and/or philosophical treatments of business, such as Adam Smith's Of the Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and excerpts from the Old and New Testaments, as well as literary treatments of business, such as Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Dickens's Hard Times, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or short stories and essays by Louis Brandeis, Leo Tolstoy, Wendell Berry, William Law, and C.S. Lewis.
Great Texts in Medicine (GTX 3370)
Dr. Eric Martin - TR 3:30 - 4:45
Examines classic works in the history of medicine (Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Hildegard von Bingen, and others) as well as important philosophical and literary investigations into the nature of illness and the work of the healing arts (Camus, Woolf, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Lahiri, and others).
Great Texts of the 18th & 19th Centuries (GTX 4320)
Dr. Alan Jacobs - TR 2:00 - 3:15
Starting in the latter third of the eighteenth century, a series of social and political movements arose that permanently and radically transformed Western culture, and indeed the whole world. Wholly new political philosophies were devised; and a new literary genre, the novel, emerged to chronicle the experiences of people whose lives were being turned upside down. In this class we will chronicle some of these massive transformations. Texts will include many but not all of the following: • Voltaire, Candide; • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract; • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; • Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; • Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; • George Eliot, Middlemarch; • Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Great Texts Capstone (GTX 4343)
Dr. Michael Foley - TR 11:00 - 12:15
In recent decades and for a number of reasons, human beings have become increasingly concerned about how they interact with the planet on which they dwell. There are many ways in which people engage nature directly or indirectly: hiking, mountain-climbing, birdwatching, stargazing, boating, hunting, fishing, shepherding, farming, the construction of roads and buildings, and of course, the consumption of material goods. This Capstone course, which addresses most of these forms of engagement, is guided by two questions: 1) What is the proper relationship between man and his so-called environment? And 2) How does a reading of great texts help us foster this relationship?
Great Texts in Performance (GTX 4V99)
Dr. Merritt Popp - MWF 2:30 - 3:20
This course examines the ways in which rediscovering a performance-based approach to various Great Texts can illuminate little-explored facets of their meanings. Together, we will explore five primary texts from authors ranging from Homer to Jane Austen to Langston Hughes and deploy the Ancient-world practice of performative interpretation in an effort to investigate several key questions: (1) What does the act of performance reveal or emphasize about the meaning and resonance of these texts for a contemporary reader? (2) How does applying the ancient practice of performance-based interpretation to modern texts aid, expand, or shift our understanding of such texts? (3) How does a performance-based approach shape us as readers and scholars? We will merge classical, literary, and theatrical approaches to better understand how our personal interpretations of these texts shape our understandings thereof, illuminating and reexamining our biases and misinterpretations in the process.