This course explores the relationship between political parties and social movements in the US. Through a historical examination of abolitionist, labor, civil rights, and other movements, we will analyze how formal electoral politics intersects with the more fluid politics of protest and direct action. We will look at how parties have grown out of, allied with, co-opted or eschewed movements for social change.

Our minds can direct and control our bodies. See for yourself: if you decide to lift your arm, and try to do it, your arm will probably go up! This course is about the relationship between our minds, bodies, and behavior. What is the mind? How did it make your arm go up? How is lifting your arm different from an involuntary muscle spasm? The answers are not as straightforward as you might think. We confront powerful arguments that the mind is not reducible to the brain or any part of the body.

Is free will possible if all our actions are causally determined? Might we be justified in blaming, praising, rewarding, or punishing people even if their actions are not free? Abstract metaphysical questions about freedom intersect in important ways with everyday problems in our relationships with others and our attitudes about moral ignorance, addiction, and madness. This course will examine these issues side by side in the hope of improving our understanding of freedom and responsibility.

What are the special challenges of obligation and responsibility that individuals, businesses and other organizations face in a complex global environment? We explore these questions using applied philosophical ethics from the traditional approaches to moral philosophy (studying the ethical character of both actions themselves and the results of those actions) and the more recent ethics of care. We apply these ethical considerations in different cases and contexts of individual decision-making and the choices and dilemmas that businesses and other organizations face.

This class is about how philosophy tried to be a science, and rejected most of its history as metaphysical nonsense. It's about how and why this failed, and returned to metaphysics. There were three phases: Logical Positivism, which argued that most of the history of philosophy was meaningless babble, and should be replaced by a much more scientific approach to the issues. Quine, who replaced the positivists with a pragmatic view of the subject. And Kripke/Lewis who returned Metaphysics to the center of concern using possible worlds. This last approach brings us to the present day.

This course explores the role of lies and practical jokes in Italian literary culture and the way the concept of humor has changed over time. We will investigate the intimate connection between power, religion, and laughter by reading some of the funniest and politically charged works. Our authors (Machiavelli, Goldoni, Pirandello, De Filippo, Fo) will take us through the streets of Renaissance Florence, eighteenth-century Venetian canals, as well as the improvised "factory theaters" of the 1970s.

Thinking of Italy as both a European and a Mediterranean country constitutes a unique challenge to our ways of reading the contemporary world. By exploring classic and lesser known Italian works intersecting the national, the regional, and the global, we will question present-day truths related to history, geography, and religion, providing an introduction to the critical methods employed in Italian, European and Middle Eastern Studies.

This course is particularly designed to create a new path for students who are taking (or have taken) Italian 101 and wish to have the necessary preparation to take Intermediate Italian (Italian 201) the following fall semester. They will be provided with the skills necessary to: understand, speak, and write Italian at the advanced beginner level, learn about contemporary Italian society, and develop the competence, interest and enthusiasm for the language that will inspire them to proceed to more advanced levels.

Throughout the modern period the way people engaged with mountains reflected the currents of political and cultural thought. This course engages the history of human-mountain relations to think transnationally about major historiographical themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: modernity, nature, empire, class, nationalism, science, leisure, environmentalism, gender, climate change, and ideology.

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to the social, cultural, and political history of both Western and Eastern Europe since 1945. By exploring the permeability of the "Iron Curtain," the course encourages students to critically assess conceptions of division and unity in European history. We will explore ways in which borders were both reinforced and transcended.