This team-taught course provides Primary Texts Certificate and other interested students with the intellectual equipment needed to access primary texts throughout the curriculum in Arts and Sciences, including instruction on techniques of careful reading of complex and multidimensional works. Students will learn how great ideas in fields ranging from philosophy to literature to science can be traced through history, and how thinkers from other eras respond to and argue with thinkers from the past, using their arguments as the foundation and/or proving ground for their own ideas. They will come away with a better ability to read and appreciate the significance of primary texts that they will encounter in their other classes and throughout their lives. This course will be required for all new students entering the program, and counts for Honors credit.
Participatin instructors:
Dr. Laurie Bagby, Lead Instructor, Political Science
Dr. Michael Donnelly, English
Dr. Marsha Frey, History
Dr. Jim Franke, Political Science
Dr. Chris Sorensen, Physics
Selected Primary Texts (some in excerpt):
Aristotle, selections from Ethics and Politics
Burke, Letters on the Regicide Peace
De Charny, The Book of Chivalry
Chaucer, "The Knight's Tale", from The Tales of Canterbury
Copernicus, de Revolutionibus
Darwin, Descent of Man
Erasmus, A Diatribe or Sermon Concerning Free Will
Federalist 10, 51
Ben Franklin's Virtues
Galileo, Dialogues and The Siderial Messenger
Hawking, The Illustrated on the Shoulders of Giants
Homer, selections from the Iliad and Odyssey
Kant, What is Enlightenment?
Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian
Newton, Principia
Nietsche, The Genealogy of Morals
The song of Roland