The Ethics of Scientific Ambition and Creation
Dr. Tatiana Zavodny

This course examines the ethical considerations of scientific ambition and creation from ancient Greece through today. Our discussions will focus on Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In analyzing these key literary texts, students will engage in philosophical discussions of humanity's desire to transcend limits through scientific knowledge, the ethical challenges of our ambitions, and the responsibilities we bear in these endeavors.

Ephemeral Self - Identity and Transformation in Great Works
Dr. Geoff West

This course examines the fluid nature of identity and selfhood through Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Metamorphoses by Ovid, and Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Students will explore how each work portrays transformation, memory, and the shifting boundaries of self, revealing the impact of time and perspective on personal identity.

The Life Worth Living
Dr. Matt Crum

The concept of eudaimonia, or “the best possible life attainable by human beings,” proposes that our happiness depends more on our own individual cultivation of virtue rather than on the mutable circumstances of the world around us. However, by some definitions, eudaimonia is only achievable to the exceptional and the elite, and it is unattainable for most ordinary people. This course explores the question of whether classical notions of happiness are available to us all and, if this kind of happiness is not our primary goal, it asks what makes life actually worth living. In thinking about these questions, we will follow the lives of four individuals in their pursuit of “the good life,” as each examines the relationship between happiness and knowledge, experience, and material prosperity.

Dr. Crum's seminars will be reading Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis; A House For Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul; Candide by Voltaire; and Oedipus the King by Sophocles.

Pleasure, Power, and the Good Life
Dr. Niyati Shenoy

The dominant attitude within many modern cultures is that sex and power are forces which corrupt our attempts to live the good life—and therefore must be contained within strict limits. In this course, we will apply modern feminist theory to three classical texts from South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe in which the equation between sex, power, and a life worth living is less binary. Each text presents sexuality as both a subject and a mechanism of control; gives us a glimpse into the world of women; and uses that often-hidden world to stage paradigmatic conflicts that spill out of the world of women to illustrate realities about power in that society as a whole.

Dr. Shenoy's seminars will be reading Kama Sutra by Vatsyayana; The Arabian Nights; and Lysistrata by Aristophanes.