ENROLL

Richard Keiser

In this course students will engage race and other forms of identity (including class and disability) using both social scientific and humanistic approaches to examine how the process of building place in the U.S. has historically meant discarding lives, excluding communities, and maintaining caste. Subtopics include: Art's impact on gentrification, POC suburbanization, Disposable lives in America, Apartheid from architectural design, and Comparative memoir.

Michael Kowalewski

"If you remember the Sixties, you weren't there."  We will test the truth of that popular adage by exploring the American youth counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the turbulent period of the late sixties. Using examples from literature, music, and film, we will examine the hope and idealism, the violence, confusion, wacky creativity, and social mores of this seminal decade in American culture. Topics explored will include the Beat Generation, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, LSD, and the rise of environmentalism, feminism, and Black Power. 

Extra Time Required

Kirk W. Ormand

In this course we will question whether or not the ancient Greeks and Romans defined “sexuality” by object-choice, whether they understood sexuality as an integral component of one’s personal identity, and whether they had a concept of “sexuality” as we currently understand it. Emphasis will be on primary texts that demonstrate notions of sexual normativity and/or identity, such as Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae, Plato’s Symposium, Aeschines’ Against Timarchos, and poetry of Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Martial, and Juvenal. We will also read modern critical theorists (Foucault, Halperin, Richlin, Winkler), and will interrogate their arguments.

Jason Decker

Conspiracy theories hit us where we are intellectually most vulnerable. Like global skeptical scenarios that occupy and perplex philosophers, they suggest a gap between appearance and reality; they suggest that we have formed our beliefs on the basis of massively misleading evidence. Often, they concern possibilities that we have never even considered, let alone properly assessed. The volume of evidence and arguments that conspiracy theorists offer for their theories can be vast and intricate. Yet it seems that, in some cases, we are perfectly within our epistemic rights in dogmatically ignoring or avoiding this volume of evidence and arguments. This won't do as a general policy, though, for history forces us to admit that sometimes conspiracy theorists are right. Theories like Bayesian formal epistemology that seem well-suited to guide us through these difficult waters often make our situation even more puzzling and problematic. To make fresh headway on these issues, this course will look critically at how philosophers, psychologists and political scientists have approached conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. We will consider topics such as cognitive dsyfunction and bias, epistemic trust, peer disagreement, the puzzle of misleading evidence, dogmatism, and formal theories of probabilistic reasoning. Along the way we will have occasion to consider many strange and fascinating conspiracy theories---a few of which have turned out to be true.