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Course Descriptions

Spring Semester 2010

Mind, Intelligence, and Machines
HONR 102A: First Year Seminar
Dr. Douglas Harms

In this seminar we will explore topics having to do with consciousness and intelligence in humans and machines, focusing in particular on the question of whether a computer could ever match the power and flexibility of the human brain. We will examine these issues from various perspectives including philosophy, biology, psychology, and computer science. Students will engage in discussion of course readings and complete a variety of written assignments, journals, and individual and group presentations. The goal of the seminar is for everyone in the seminar (students and teacher alike) to wrestle with the philosophical issues surrounding the topic of computers and consciousness, understand the technical dimensions of the topic, and come to appreciate humankind's role in the grand scheme of things.

After Catastrophe: Germany and the Legacy of World War II
HONR 102B: First Year Seminar
Dr. Julia Bruggemann

This course will explore the complex legacies of war, dictatorship, and Holocaust for Germany after 1945. We will address questions of guilt and responsibility, victimhood and agency. Some important questions we will explore are: How did the physical, moral, political, and ethical destruction of the war and Holocaust influence Germany's reconstruction in the postwar context? How did contemporaries, historians, politicians, artists etc. participate in these processes? How have these discussions changed in recent years as most are eyewitnesses are dying and new generations develop their own interpretations? Some of the debates that surround these questions are: Who has the right to remember and be remembered? Who can claim to be a victim, in other words: were Germans victims - or perpetrators? Can a new German state be "normal" and overcome its historical baggage? What's the difference between guilt and responsibility and how does it affect future generations?

Noir: Film and Fiction
HONR 102C: First Year Seminar
Dr. Michael Sinowitz

What do we mean by noir—film noir or roman noir? In More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts James Naremore suggests that noir is much harder to define than something like the Western, and he resists defining it by instead studying how the term has been used and transformed over time. As a class, we will respond to this problem by exploring examples of what has commonly been considered noir and creating our own definition (if constructing such a definition is even possible). Naremore’s chief concern was with identifying what film noir was and is (if it still exists); perhaps an even more difficult problem lies in defining the roman noir. Are these simply the hard-boiled detective and crime stories said to lie at the origins of film noir? Like film noir, the roman noir is a label given to texts well after the time of their creation; they can be interpreted as a contemporary attempt to organize the past by artificially categorizing texts. What do we know about these texts? They tend to be dark—both literally and figuratively; they tend to have urban settings; they often feature ‘hard-boiled’ types; they often feature femme fatales. Our class discussions and writing will focus on exploring these questions of genre while also seeking to place these works in their historical and cultural contexts. We will also think critically about the philosophies seemingly lying under the surface of many of these texts and we will also consider the ways in which these texts construct gender and the implications of those constructions. And best of all, we’ll watch a lot of film noir and read a lot of hardboiled fiction.

Twice Told Tales: Nineteenth-Century America as History and Literature
HONR 300A: Humanities Seminar
Dr.s Harry Brown and David Gellman

This course investigates major issues in the nineteenth-century U.S. through the dual prisms of literature and history. Our discussions will encompass the frontier, race, slavery, war, and the fate and moral meaning of the American democratic experiment. Major nineteenth authors will include James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Stephen Crane. We will also draw from a variety of modern texts by historians, popular and scholarly, not only to provide context, but also to interrogate the novelists’ vision and purpose. By the same token, we will use fiction to interrogate the limits of conventional history and to consider whether fiction can transcend these limits in our quest to discover the American past. The team-taught format of the course, which will be led by a literature professor and a historian, will underscore the nature of the dialogue that is possible between and across disciplines. Thus, in addition to developing nuanced insights into nineteenth-century U.S. culture, we will ponder how the existence of academic ‘disciplines’ helps generate knowledge but also can undermine broader and deeper understanding.

The Evolution of Animal Behavior
HONR 300B: Science Seminar
Dr. James Benedix

One of the main paradigms of biology is the assumption that organisms are shaped by natural selection, and thus they have evolved adaptations that work well in the environments in which they live. This approach applies not only to relatively simple genetic traits like body size or color, but also to complex, highly variable traits like behavior. But how do biologists study the evolution of these complex traits? This course will examine the study of behavioral evolution, also known as behavioral ecology. We will look at what is known about the adaptive nature of behaviors and the ways in which they evolve, and consider how what we know about animals relates to the behavior of humans.

Reason, Power, Values, and Propaganda: How Social Sciences Seek Explanation and Understanding
HONR 300C: Social Science Seminar
Keith Nightenhelser

In this course we'll look at concepts of personhood, causation, explanation, and understanding in different social sciences, such as history, political science, psychology, economics, and anthropology. We will read both theoretical explorations of what the right unit of explanation should be (individual persons or groups, and groups of what size?), and of how social sciences can support causal and explanatory claims. We'll look at two major sets of case studies. Our theoretical readings will deal with rational choice, social norms, analysing power in social groups, and the basic principles that account for the effectiveness of propaganda. The first set of case studies will compare approaches to understanding mass killings and genocides. The second set will compare some different approaches that anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians have taken in explaining events, and in understanding cultural groups; our case will compare efforts to understand a group of North Africans with efforts to understand some Europeans. Students will write very short and informal reaction papers, three short papers, and one term paper. There will be a narrow selection of available topics for the short papers, but the lengthier term paper will be on a topic devised by the student. Before the first class meeting, students will be asked to read Pratkanis and Aronson's book "Age of Propaganda" and Malcolm Gladwell's recent book "Outliers." Both books are written for a general audience, and students should find them quite entertaining. Other readings in the course will include Jon Elster's book"Explaining Social Behavior," Steven Lukes "Power: A Radical View," some chapters from Kelsey Kauffman's study of Prison Officers, some chapters from Samantha Power's book "A Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide," some chapters from James Waller's "Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing," some writings by Pierre Bourdieu, and essays by philosophers such as Peter Winch and Charles Taylor on what's special about social science.

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