The One-Line Version: FFC Courses

The Dark Side of Utopia: From Plato to the Holocaust
. . . if you'd like to explore why and how Nazism came to power and the ideology that led to the Holocaust [Harran FFC Seminar -- enrollment is restricted] 

Darwin: His Life and Influence
. . . if you’d like to know more about Darwin’s own struggle with evolution into one of the most important scientific thinkers of all time

Individualism, Collectivism, and the Good Society . . . on standing alone and hanging together, individual rights and community needs and the compatibility of both, issues that pervade the Western intellectual tradition

Imagining Utopia: Constructing Reality from Plato to LeGuin

. . . if you'd like to explore the impact that idealized vision of society have had on our lived experience and imagined futures

 

History of Political Philosophy
. . . philosophical approaches to solving historical problems, as idealists, materialists, utilitarians, and other -ists and -ians, including terrorists, fundamentalists, and libertarians, have argued 

War and Peace from Ancient to Contemporary
. . . how to think outside the box about war and peace from those who succeeded and often failed before us: the Classical Greeks

Twilight of the Gods
. . . to consider how doubt and disbelief are part of religious traditions, and how agnosticism, skepticism, and atheism are themselves schools of thought 

Exploring Texts in Context: From Athens to Paris
. . . seeing the city and its inhabitants across the centuries in literature, art, and cultural history

Images and Identity:  Voices and Choices
. . . is the voice you speak with your own?  What roles do society, language, culture, the body, economics, and all the elements of life play in making "you"?

 

The Christ of History and the Jesus of Faith
. . . if you believe that views about Jesus and the development of early Christianity should be based on scholarship rather than on conspiracy theories masquerading as history, this class is for you

Self and Society:  The Social Construction of Reality
. . . where does society end and my self begin?  Am I authentically me or am I essentially a reflection of my society?  An adventure in de-socialization and de-hypnotization

Ancient Religions and Modern Values
. . . a course that explores ancient religious texts in order to address some of the most compelling questions in human life:  Does God exist?  Is any one religion true?  Why are we here?  Is this life all there is?

 

From Plato to Freud
. . . this course examines authors whose goal was to help their readers attain self-knowledge. From the time of the ancient Greeks, the simple dictum "know thyself" has been considered an essential key to success, happiness and the good life

 

Beauties, Beasts, and the Construction of Western Culture
. . . in this course we'll explore the origins and the legacies of various western fairy tales (and their beauties and beasts) with an emphasis on how we have been shaped -- culturally, politically, historically, individually, and collectively -- by these tales

 

Humanity Against Itself: From Ethnic Cleansing to Global Warming
. . . can we identify historical patterns of genocide in relation to "wars" against nature? -- and if so, what conclusions can we draw about human social organization?

 

Globalization, Citizenship, and Consumption
. . . move beyond the buzzwords to learn what globalization really means and how to do something about it as an informed, critically thinking global citizen

 

Citizenship and Community
. . . on the give-and-take of community membership, over time and cultures

 

American Theatre in Contemporary Culture

. . . we'll uncover and create our own response to how pivotal social events impact the American contemporary theatre scene

 

Cultural Materialism and the Labor Wars

 . . . how have U.S. cultural values been shaped by the role of Labor? Learn the often-forgotten history of working men and women in our culture and how the ways we work come to define us 

The Enlightenment

. . . immerse yourself in a time when men and women of great intelligence brought their minds to bear upon a whole spectrum of human pursuits and concerns without concern for disciplinary boundaries. We’ll read works of Montaigne, Molière, Swift, Pope, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Locke, Smith, Hume, and others. Students with appropriate preparation may elect to read some works in the original French. 

Textual Encounters

. . . we’ll study worldviews in collision: idealists and existentialists, Freudians and Romantics, nihilists and imperialists. Plato, Shakespeare, and Freud will meet up with Sherman Alexie, David Henry Hwang, Jon Krakauer, and Tim O’Brien, and we’ll explore their competing ideologies

 

Modern Culture and Identities

. . . or how one Renaissance led to the next—ours

History of Economic Thought

. . . traces the history of Western economic thought from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 to present day, including the contributions of such great thinkers as Ricardo, Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Galbraith, and Friedman. How did each understand the nature of economic life as well as social and political relationships in the production of goods and services, the distribution of wealth and income, and the utilization of land, labor, and capital?