Current Offerings: Spring

This multidisciplinary seminar will focus on several key texts, ideas, and methods of modern science. These are texts that explore what it means to be human by asking questions about both human nature and the larger natural world of which we are a part, about methods, ethics, and aesthetics. They investigate the nature of reality and of dream, our shared human and nonhuman evolutionary history, and the ways in which nonhuman cultural worlds are similar to and different from ours. They ask questions about our distance from each other, individually and culturally, and from the stars. They shine a light on science’s relation to culture and culture’s use of technology. They both embody and consider what it means to be modern.

Required Texts 

• The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (from which we will read Albert Einstein, E. O. Wilson, Matt Ridley, Niko Tinbergen, Rachel Carson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, James Watson, Ernst Mayr, Loren Eiseley, Paul Davies, Brian Greene, Primo Levi, and others)  
• Robert Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir
• Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers