Origins and Evolution of Modern Thought

This two-semester course immerses students in an exploration of significant exemplars, milestones and developments of human thought from ancient to modern times.

The fall semester (HONR 1015) engages students in an exploration of foundational thought and texts of the ancient world. This fall semester also fulfills university UW 1020 requirements.

The spring semester (HONR 1016) builds on the encounter with foundational ancient thinkers and texts provided in the fall course by engaging students in the exploration of key developments and trajectories in human thought and inquiry to modern times.

First year students take one Origins and Evolution of Modern Thought course each semester.

Revolution

Professor Joseph Trullinger

HONR 1016: MV - 3 Credits

CRN: 77611

MW 1:00PM - 2:15PM

Fulfills:

GPAC: Humanities

Course Description: Many political regimes and people in general look to revolution as an inspiring foundational event, a turning-point when the will of the people finally becomes victorious. Everything after it (so the story goes) is new, legitimate, democratic and modern. But sometimes people who utilize the rhetoric of revolution oppose the reality of revolution. This course is an attempt to discern the reality from the rhetoric by critically discussing several important philosophical stances for and against revolution. Together with peers, you'll engage in close readings and friendly debates about the many issues these texts raise: what separates a revolution from a coup, whether reforming a system is less pragmatic than revolting against it, how counterrevolutions work, whether revolutions can succeed without violence, and many more.

Freedom in the Modern Age

Professor William Winstead

HONR 1016: MV1 - 3 Credits

CRN: 77614

MW 2:30PM - 3:45PM

HONR 1016: MV2 - 3 Credits

CRN: 77615

MW 4:00PM - 5:15PM

Fulfills:

GPAC: Humanities

Course Description: The modern age has often been characterized as the epoch of absolute freedom. Its insistence on individual liberty and the right to live one's life as one wishes, free of interference from tradition, church, or state, are symptomatic of modernity's radical commitment to freedom. The scope of its emancipatory impulse may be measured not only by the radical politics of the age—the American, French, and Russian revolutions, among others—but also by the defense of unrestrained expression in the aesthetic sphere (artistic freedom, freedom of speech) and toleration of individual conscience in the moral sphere. Our readings this semester will examine the intellectual revolutions that established freedom as the central value of the modern project and institutionalized it in the liberal state, the market economy, and the self-reflective individual. In the final section of the course, we will consider the subtle and profound forms of personal liberation found in modern Buddhist thought. Readings will include Mill, Nietzsche, Freud, Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, The Combahee River Collective, the Dali Lama, and Zen Buddhism.

Freedom & Liberation

Professor Eyal Aviv

HONR 1016: MV3 - 3 Credits

CRN: 77616

TR 11:00AM - 12:15PM

Fulfills:

GPAC: Humanities

Course Description: Our lives are filled with deadlines, dress codes, or laws that limit our personal desires. These constraints are a part of the human (and non-human) condition. But so is our universal desire to be free. Imagine your life with absolute freedom and nothing to limit you. What would it look like? Martin Luther King Jr. ended his powerful “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, declaring that we are “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.” The Buddha famously declared, “Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.” But what does it mean to be free or liberated, and from what?

This semester, we’ll explore these questions together. Like the Fall semester, we’ll read and discuss a diverse mix of thinkers, writers, and artists who challenge us to think deeply about freedom and liberation. We’ll examine the multifaceted nature of the constraints that bind us and the various dimensions of freedom. We’ll also investigate the tricky balance between individual freedom and collective well-being.

Through readings, discussions, and critical reflections, we’ll appreciate the rich diversity of perspectives on what it means to be free. The course will encourage you to engage deeply with the material, debate various viewpoints, and develop your own understanding of freedom and liberation.

The Death of God

Professor Mark Ralkowski

HONR 1016: MV4 - 3 Credits

CRN: 77617

MW 11:00AM - 12:15PM

Fulfills:

GPAC: Humanities

Course Description: Is capitalism always dehumanizing, or can it promote human welfare? How do race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and social class affect our understanding of ourselves and others? Are our cultural values good for us, or do they undermine our mental health and harm the planet? Do experiences of marginalization and oppression give those who experience them unique knowledge about our society and how it operates? What might the earth and nonhuman animals teach us about how we ought to live? As we explore questions like these in this course, we will discover how philosophy can be what Freire calls the “practice of freedom.” We will begin by studying the rise of the modern worldview and the spread of its political values, but most of our time will be spent on a wide range of cultural critics—e.g., Tolstoy, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Frankl, Baldwin, de Beauvoir, Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, Freire, the Dalai Lama, and Robin Wall Kimmerer—who lay the foundations for a less alienating and more humane world. Our discussions will cover some of their most revolutionary ideas, which have transformed the way we think about the human place in nature, the relationship between culture and economics, our conscious and unconscious minds, colonialism and liberation, gender and racial justice, and the aims of an emancipatory education. The main goal of this course is for us to see how these philosophies are more than abstract theories in books that are hard to read. They are provocations to reexamine our beliefs and values, reckon with our place in history, and reimagine the future of our interconnected world.

Modernity and It's "Others"

Professor Sabrina Harris

HONR 1016: MV5 - 3 Credits

CRN: 77628

TR 1:00PM - 2:15PM

Fulfills:

GPAC: Humanities

Course Description: Modernity is often characterized by the notions of freedom and innovation - these forces are framed as drivers of progress and change in areas of technology, development, and social organization. This course will grapple specifically with how modernity has shaped our views of ourselves and others. It will explore how modernity has constructed and (re)produced hegemonic ideas of “ideal” modern subjects - and how it has also created conditions and relations of power that have positioned many subjects outside this ideal. What are these forces, and how do they shape our perceptions of ourselves and others even today? How do they inform the institutions and forms of political organization we undertake? How do they open or foreclose possibilities for understanding identity, relationality, community in governance? To answer these questions, this course will explore how dynamics like capitalism, coloniality, gender, race, sexuality, religion, and other relations of power both shape and are shaped through modernity. We will grapple with questions about the same forces of modernity which enabled liberty for some simultaneously induced constraints for others, and how these dynamics enable us to understand ourselves and our “others” as modern subjects. Reading across a broad range of authors and perspectives, this class offers students the opportunity for a rich theoretical site to engage and reflect on modernity and its “others” in shaping the contours of our daily lives.

Bio: Prof. Harris is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Program Coordinator for the International Politics Cohort in the Women's Leadership Program (and will be regularly teaching for the UHP!). She employs critical feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial approaches to explore how international institutions and their constituencies jointly shape objectives and practices of global governance.

Liberty

Professor Theodore Christov

HONR 1016: MV6 - 3 Credits

CRN: 77622

MW 9:00AM - 10:15AM

Fulfills:

GPAC: Humanities

Course Description: How is the individual liberty of the moderns distinct from the collective liberty of the ancients? While among the ancients the individual, regarded as sovereign in public affairs, had no notion of individual rights and was a slave in one’s private affairs, for the moderns the individual was sovereign because of one’s freedom. Why do we, moderns, continually clamor for the advantages of rights and liberties, while the ancients never felt the need for individual liberty? This Liberty seminar examines the various sources of our modern condition by showing why liberty is the unique discovery of the moderns. First, liberty as a political question; second, liberty as a social question; third, liberty as an emancipatory question. We will grapple with fundamental political concepts, such as state sovereignty, natural law, and social contract; moral ideas, such as autonomy, equality, and reasoning; and social forces, such as labor, class struggle, and human emancipation. By asking whether modernity’s resources are by nature or by convention, we will question and critique our own understanding and experience of liberty. The course will help you develop your ability to make and evaluate arguments, both in writing and in conversation, and thereby help you think clearly and critically about how politics and society shape and reshape our experience of liberty.