Studies I-III Science

This course is taught in multiple sections by individual faculty in the Honors Program. While the texts will vary somewhat with the professor, the course will in all cases examine a series of historical periods important in the development of our contemporary worldview. We begin in the Fall by looking at the emergence of what has been called “the culture of measurement,” or the beginning of the natural sciences—the growth and development in the seventeenth century of a new, experimental way of looking at the world. We consider both what elements of the older worldview this new way of looking replaced, and which ones it re-used in significantly reshaped form. Particular attention is paid to the class restrictions and gendered assumptions that shaped the “ideal experimenter” of the new scientific project. In the Winter quarter, we consider how that new perspective on the natural world is transferred in the eighteenth century to critical questions about the social world; as one example, the racialized construction of Enlightenment thought is inspected, especially its reliance on the Oriental “Other.” In the Spring, we extend this analysis into the development of positivist philosophy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the formation of critiques of that philosophy. Students also consider the ways in which the privilege of autobiographical statement is restricted by gender, class, and moral standing.

Core Texts - I
Montaigne, “Of the Useful and the Honorable”
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
Pascal, selections from Pensées
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life

Core Texts - II
Montesquieu, Persian Letters
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream
Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

Core Texts - III
Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

Professors usually assign a least one additional text each quarter that varies by section.