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From the Stoics to Ubuntu: Philosophies of the Good Life — PHI2149.01

Instructor: Paul Voice
Days & Time: TU,FR 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 4

This class examines a variety of answers to the ancient question: How do I live a good life? We’ll engage with thinkers from diverse traditions across time and space as we clarify our own understanding of what makes life worth living and as we articulate a more developed conception of the good life.

Terrible Choices: Philosophy & Tragedy — PHI4226.01

Instructor: Catherine McKeen
Days & Time: TH 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world?

Form and Process: Introduction to Painting — PAI2107.01

Instructor: Ann Pibal
Days & Time: WE 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

This course introduces a variety of materials, techniques and approaches to working with oil paint. Emphasis is placed on developing and understanding of color, form and space as well as individual research and conceptual concerns. The daily experience of seeing, along with examples from art history and contemporary art, provide a base from which investigations are made. Formal, poetic, and social implications within paintings both from class and from a wide-ranging selection of practicing artists are examined and discussed. Students complete work weekly.

Chromophilia: Investigations in Color — VA4409.01

Instructor: Ann Pibal
Days & Time: MO 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

Chromophilia, refers to intense passion and love for color. What is it about color that has the power to induce reverie, and conversely to manipulate, or disgust? How does color work? What is the role of color in visual art? In language? How do we understand and respond to color from phenomenological, poetic, philosophical, and societal vantage points? How as artists can we become effective stewards of our passionately-loved and yet ever-shifting chroma?

Painting Studio: Visual Inquiry in Context — PAI4220.01

Instructor: Ann Pibal
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

This intermediate level painting course will take as its platform the investigation of writing by artists about art and artists. While developing their own self-defined studio practices, students will engage with primary documents of art history - artists' essays, letters and sketchbooks.

Global Environmental Politics — POL2108.01

Instructor: John Hultgren
Days & Time: MO,TH 10:00am-11:50am
Credits: 4

Contemporary efforts to confront our most pressing ecological problems are characterized by a tension between the global realities of these problems and the territorial borders and logics that define sovereign nation-states. This course will explore this tension in three parts. First, we will engage with a variety of theoretical and conceptual debates introduced by scholars of global environmental politics — a heterodox field that draws insights from international relations theory, international political economy, ecological economics, and environmental sociology (among others).

Kant Seminar: The Three Critiques — PHI4266.01

Instructor: Paul Voice
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) describes his own work in metaphysics by analogy with Copernicus’s revolution in astronomy. He constructs a system of thought that attempts to move beyond the empiricism of Hume and the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff. His method – critique – and his theory – transcendental idealism – have profoundly influenced all subsequent philosophy.

Sustainable Agriculture, Building Regenerative and Resilient Communities — APA2348.01

Instructor: Kelie Bowman
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 2

Climate change, poverty, and food access are all compelling and urgent issues confronting our society. Growing local food is one significant way we can respond. Having received the Ź Fair Food Initiative Grant with the mission to develop educational training programs in agriculture/food system workforce development and to create small business, this class will be practice based learning in regenerative agricultural practices and the creation of sustainable food systems.

Plato: Symposium — PHI2163.02

Instructor: Catherine McKeen
Days & Time: TU,FR 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 2

It is 416 BCE. A group of Athenian men are gathered together for a party, a celebration, a symposium. Among the company are the tragic playwright Agathon, Agathon’s lover Pausanias, the beautiful but doomed Phaedrus, the comic playwright Aristophanes, the doctor Eryximachus, and the (also perhaps doomed) philosopher Socrates. Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea, puts in a surprise appearance. Alcibiades, the glamor boy of Athens, makes a late, splashy, gate-crashy arrival. There are the usual snacks and drinks.

Scanning Electron Microscopy Research Methods — ES4107.01

Instructor: Tim Schroeder
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-4:00pm
Credits: 2

Scanning electron microscopes are a fundamental tool in the physical and life sciences. When equipped with an X-Ray spectrometer, a SEM can provide rapid physical and chemical data of specimens on extremely small scales. This class with cover the theory and practical applications of SEM imaging and analysis for advanced science students who have their own research interests. Students will be expected to develop and conduct an independent research project through this class.

Epistemic Justice — PHI2162.01

Instructor: Catherine McKeen
Days & Time: TU,FR 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 2

How does one’s social positionality affect one’s status as a knower? Who is heard? Who is believed? This seven-week course is focused on questions of justice and power in relation to knowledge. We will engage with recent work in social epistemology—philosophical theories of belief and knowledge—with an emphasis on feminist epistemologies, anti-racist epistemologies, and epistemologies of resistance. These approaches stress that knowers are embodied, situated, embedded in communities, and have multiple, intersecting social identities.

Sets and Structures — MAT2121.01

Instructor: Andrew McIntyre
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics underwent a vast expansion, into new, exciting, and increasingly counter-intuitive realms. The subject risked mystification and mutual incomprehensibility between experts in different sub-fields. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of French mathematicians, under the pseudonym Bourbaki, undertook an ultimately successful program to use the foundation of set theory to put all of mathematics onto a common conceptual and logical foundation.

Deep Fakes: An Introduction to Oil Painting — PAI2109.01

Instructor: J Blackwell
Days & Time: TU 8:30am-12:10pm
Credits: 4

Fake news, reality television, “IRL” – asserting the veracity of our perceptions is a constant preoccupation in contemporary culture. What is real? Realism is a widely used term with multiple connotations: verisimilitude, authenticity, objectivity, truth, fact.

Advanced Workshop for Painting and Drawing: The Contemporary Idiom — PAI4216.01

Instructor: J Blackwell
Days & Time: WE 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

This course is for experienced student artists with a firm commitment to serious work in the studio. Students will work primarily on self-directed projects in an effort to refine individual concerns and subject matter. Students will present work regularly for critique in class as well as for individual studio meetings with the instructor. Development of a strong work ethic will be crucial.

Energy, Environment, and Climate — ENV2120.01

Instructor: Tim Schroeder
Days & Time: MO,TH 3:40pm-5:30pm
Credits: 4

The comforts and amenities of modern life require vast inputs of energy to power an industrial society. While the benefits of industrial society are significant, if unevenly shared, the environmental costs of energy extraction and production are significant. These environmental costs are also unevenly shared.

Environment and Public Action — APA2122.01

Instructor: David Bond
Days & Time: MO,TH 1:40pm-3:30pm
Credits: 4

Today it is clear that the environment matters. In activism and scholarship and public policy, the environment has become a potent (if sometimes obligatory) point of reference. Less attention, however, has focused on the emergence of the environment itself as a converging field of action for advocacy, science, and statecraft. In this seminar, we will reflect not only on what we know of the environment but also on how we came to know the environment.