Symbiosis: Where science meets the humanities

Undergraduate / Graduate

Since the (western) 18th century, it has been normative to separate humanities and the sciences. The institutional side of this divide is reflected on college campuses, where there is little intellectual exchange between these areas. This course seeks to challenge that separation by (1) familiarizing ourselves with the history that led to it; (2) exploring materials from Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault; and (3) studying points of intersection such as metaphor in science, science fiction, the Turing Test, humanistic medicine, the cyclical nature of scientific ideas since antiquity, and the metaphysics of science. Requirements: midterm exam; oral presentation; final essay of 8-10 pages