This course is a broad survey of major canonical works (“Great Books”) emphasizing from the premodern traditions of Western Civilization since the Greeks. These texts offer responses to central questions that, across the disciplinary divides, continue to inform contemporary work in the social sciences and the humanities. By considering these enduring questions and the responses of writers in Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Europe, we seek to examine core issues of the liberal arts as they find expression across what would later become disciplinary divisions.

This course is a broad survey of major canonical works (“Great Books”) emphasizing the Premodern traditions of Western Civilization since the Greeks. These texts offer responses to central questions that, across the disciplinary divides, continue to inform contemporary work in the social sciences and the humanities. Indeed, the “disciplines” or departments as we know them on campus are of relatively recent invention, compared to the millennia of treatises, poetry, plays, literature, sacred writings, histories and philosophical inquiries that sought answers to the questions later asked by the disciplines themselves in the humanities and social sciences. This course is not a history of the disciplines, nor is it an attempt to find precursive texts for each discipline -- we do not seek to construct disciplinary canons or genealogies. Instead, it is an account of the enduring questions of western civilization that later found homes in the disciplines, but whose origins lie in a “pre-disciplinary” world. While we choose the framework of the disciplines to present these texts, and to ask recurring questions that can today be found in separate disciplines, we seek to problematize the history of disciplinary knowledge. In this course, we investigate how contemporary concerns about modern social problems have a deep, but also an interdisciplinary, history.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills