What are we? What defines us? How did human culture arise? We communicate with spoken and written language, we make tools to build even more complicated tools, we learn calculus to solve differential equations, we use inductive reasoning to seek generalizable knowledge, we understand other people?s mind and emotion, we understand humor, we lie, cheat, and deceive others. Are these what makes us human? This course examines psychological and neuroscientific bases of human mind and behavior that are uniquely related to human culture and experience (that is, humanity).

Contact department for description. (Gen.Ed. SB)

This course introduces graduate students to the logical foundations of research methods and the wide variety of methodologies used by political scientists.

Introduction to contemporary methods in philosophical research and writing.

Law assumes facts, creates entities, and conceals aspects of its operation in order to extend or limit the power of courts in deciding cases. Law creates and deploys fictions (e.g. corporate persons, reasonable persons, equal protection, compelling interests) in that endeavor. This social construction of law and legal phenomena may be construed as proper or improper depending upon the power of competing stories and story tellers, as well as how we the audience receives and give life to them.

This is a course in applied physics with the ultimate goal of describing how stars work. Topics include gravitation, stellar mass determination, stellar structure, stellar atmospheres, stellar evolution, and the physics of pulsating stars. We will approach each of these topics from fundamental concepts and we will work our way to a detailed understanding. On the way we will review the structure of the atom, radiative processes, and some basic principles of thermodynamics.

Not available at this time

This class will explore mystical literature of various traditions, both religious and secular. Reading these texts as literary expressions of union or contact with the transcendent, we will analyze the ways in which they seek to capture what is usually considered to be an inexpressible, non-verbal experience. Readings will draw from the mystical traditions of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, as well as European Romanticism and other, less easily categorized, attempts to articulate communion with something beyond the everyday.

The Junior/Senior Seminar explores unexpected and non-traditional approaches to collaboration, with a focus on interdisciplinary practices. Together, we will investigate and redefine the role of the collaborator and the artist. Practices, traditions and histories will be analyzed in an ongoing cycle of discussion, reading and making. An emphasis will be placed on developing concepts and imagery in relation to contemporary art practice and theory. Participants may work in any medium, format or discipline.

Required for majors. Emphasis on an oral and written interpretation of current journal articles in selected fields of biochemistry.