The concepts and relations (force, energy and momentum) describing physical interactions and the changes in motion they produce, along with applications to the physical and life sciences. Lab experiments, lectures and problem-solving activities are interwoven into each class. Discussion sections offer additional help with mathematics, data analysis and problem solving. This course satisfies medical school and engineering requirements for an introductory physics I course with labs.

The concepts and relations (force, energy and momentum) describing physical interactions and the changes in motion they produce, along with applications to the physical and life sciences. Lab experiments, lectures and problem-solving activities are interwoven into each class. Discussion sections offer additional help with mathematics, data analysis and problem solving. This course satisfies medical school and engineering requirements for an introductory physics I course with labs.

Our planet’s reliance on carbon-based, non-renewable energy sources comes at a severe environmental, economic and political cost. Are there alternatives?This course offers a hands-on exploration of renewable energy technologies with an emphasis on understanding the underlying scientific principles. Students will assess worldwide energy demand, study the limits to improved energy efficiency, explore the science and technology of solar, wind, and hydropower, understand the science behind global warming, investigate climate models, and evaluate strategies for a sustainable future.

This course examines how we know our own minds. We will ask questions such as these: How do we come to know that we have minds? Is introspection a kind of inner sense? Do we have immediate access to the contents of our own minds? Is our knowledge of our own minds privileged or infallible? How is language implicated in self-knowledge? Do animals know the contents of their minds?

This course prepares students to understand and critically evaluate various ethical perspectives on human beings’ interactions with nature and these perspectives’ applications to environmental issues. The principal ethical perspectives studied are anthropocentrism, biocentric individualism, environmental holism and environmental pragmatism. We study representative descriptions and defenses of these perspectives and examine in particular whether they can validly and effectively help us resolve environmental problems.

Close examination of the different but converging ways in which moral, political and legal contexts shape the analysis of an issue. For example: questions about the status of a right to privacy; the history of disgust as a ground for laws governing human behavior.

This course explores a cluster of the most fundamental questions about human nature: What are we? Do we have core selves that determine our identity? If so, what is such a self, and how does it develop? Or might we be selfless? If we are selfless, what is the nature of our identities? What might the reality or unreality of the self mean for the nature of our experience, for ethics, or for what gives our lives meaning?

How are works of art like and unlike other objects in the worlds that humans inhabit and make, like and unlike other human projects? What capacities are called upon in the creation and understanding of such works? What is the role of art and the artist in contemporary society? We read essays on aesthetics by Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bell, Dewey, Danto, Benjamin, Berger, Sontag, Nochlin and Lyotard, among others. Experience with art is welcome but not required. Assignments are hands-on and applied, involving extensive use of the resources of the Smith College Museum of Art.

Among the most important and philosophically intriguing results in 20th-century logic are the limitative theorems such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Tarski’s demonstration of the indefinability of truth in certain languages. A wide variety of approaches to resolving fundamental mathematical and semantical paradoxes have emerged in the wake of these results, as well as a variety of alternative logics including paraconsistent logics in which contradictions are tolerated.