As, Ideas: Big Ideas

4.0 credits · Undergraduate

This course is designed for first year students interested in how ideas – across time and with changing valences – shape and help us navigate our world. At stake are conversations and contestations across centuries that focus on Big Ideas such as “Origins” (Genesis, Darwin, the Big Bang); “Truth” (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche); “Storytelling” (Jesus, Kafka, Octavia Butler); “Liberation” (Exodus and Leviticus, Frederick Douglass, Sigmund Freud, Angela Davis); and “Revolution” (the biblical notion of jubilee, Marx, DuBois). The material will not be read chronologically but by shared themes, problems, and conflicts. A central concern is tracing the paradigm shifts and different models of thought that occur between antiquity, the nineteenth century, and today.