FRS 101
Interpreting Human Experience Fall 2009
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

How we make sense of the world, and of our lives, depends to a considerable degree on the intellectual methodologies we apply to the task of interpretation. Freud, for instance, saw selfhood and perception as fundamentally determined by the structures of the psyche itself; Marx, by contrast, argued that our sense of reality is conditioned primarily by our material and social circumstances; more recently, historian of science Thomas Kuhn has emphasized that the underlying assumptions which shape the very questions we pose as thinkers significantly influence and limit what data, and thus what reality, we are most likely to observe. This course aims to provide a foundational experience for the liberal arts education, by engaging with key religious, political, literary, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytic texts with a view to complicating our sense of the purposes and possibilities of intellectual life and confronting the challenges of epistemology. Readings will include works by Plato, John Stuart Mill, Marx, E.M. Forster, Freud, Rousseau, Richard Dawkins, Brecht, Dangarembga, and extracts from the Bible and the Qur’an. In keeping with the aims of the FRS program, the course is intended to foster productive connections between what we discuss and debate in class and your broader experiences as students. The course will invite and promote interdisciplinary connections between core ways of seeing and interpreting the world, with a strong emphasis on improving your critical skills.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1591
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: regular short writing assignments designed to hone your reading skills; four papers ranging from 3-5 pages; and active contribution to discussion
Extra Info: students who participate live together in the same residential unit, and take the seminar together during the fall semester
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: enrollment limited to FRS students
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills

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