'This course explores the role of food and eating in Jewish religious culture, but will also include a significant comparative religious dimension. Topics will include the ritual, religious, and social significance of the dietary laws in Judaism, the symbolic foods of Passover and other festivals, fasting and ascetic attitudes toward food, as well as food culture as a marker of Jewish identity.'

'Mysticism refers to a type of religious life in which individuals seek intimate and personal, direct and intense experience of the Divine. There exists a rich and fascinating Jewish mystical tradition with hundreds of books of diverse kinds.

'This course provides a critical introduction to the writings contained in the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament). It investigates the social and historical context of the ancient Israelites, examines a range of ancient Near Eastern literature, and introduces the principal methods of biblical studies. Participants will read much of the Hebrew Bible as well as select non-Israelite sources.

'This year-long course introduces students to modern, spoken Hebrew by a systematic study of grammar and vocabulary. Emphasis will be placed on conversational Hebrew as it is spoken in Israel today. Some attention will be given to the cultural setting of modern Hebrew as well. No previous knowledge necessary.'

'David Chalmers has dubbed the problem of consciousness 'The Hard Problem.' How can a lump of physical matter (for example, your brain) have an experience? How can it be like something, feel like something, to be in one physical state rather than another? There has been a tremendous surge of divergent thinking on these questions in the intersections between neuroscience and philosophy--stories about how matter can be conscious, and stories of why our minds are too limited ever to answer such questions.

'We are fallible creatures, prone to making all sorts of mistakes. How should we accommodate evidence of our own epistemic imperfection? Should such evidence lead us to doubt ourselves and our beliefs? Or are we rationally permitted to dismiss it? One way in which we might acquire evidence of our own error is through disagreement. The discovery that someone you respect disagrees with you can make you lose confidence in, and sometimes altogether abandon, your belief in the disputed proposition--but should it? Does disagreement provide evidence of error?

An exploration of philosophical and theoretical issues encountered in the study of film such as: Why do we need a theory of film? What is a film anyway? Do films have 'authors'? How do films engage our emotions? Can films be socially critical? What can we learn from films? There will be weekly required film screenings.

'This course will cover three topics (liberty, equality, and the reconciliation of liberty and equality) along three dimensions of justice (interpersonal, civic, and distributive) and through the lens of three theories of justice (utilitarianism, libertarianism, and egalitarian liberalism).'

'This course develops a symbolic system that can be used as the basis for inference in all fields. It will provide syntax and semantics for the language of this system and investigate its adequacy. It provides the basis for all further work in logic or in the philosophical foundations of mathematics. Much of the course has a mathematical flavor, but no knowledge of mathematics is necessary.'

This course is an introduction to the central topics in epistemology (theory of knowledge) and metaphysics (theory of reality). It will look at questions such as: How is knowledge possible? What is knowledge? Do we know anything? Is time real? What makes you the same person now and in ten years? Could things be otherwise than they are?