This course is the bread and butter of my teaching. It is required for all philosophy majors and serves as their introduction to the ideas and methods of ancient philosophy. In most iterations, I build the course around the concept of a first principle, showing (a la Aristotle) that the pre-Socratics introduced the framework and that it was perfected later. I vary texts and course structure frequently.
Syllabus
Aristotle's corpus is simultaneously impossible and imperative: impossible to read independently and yet necessary to know. This course is a rigorous initiation to his conceptual toolkit (the texts of the so-called Organon are taught), his four causes (Physics), and some significant upshot of those foundational ideas. In some years, the Metaphysics is taught as the upshot, in others it is the Nicomachean Ethics or the biological works (Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals).
Syllabus
The widely recognized crisis in civic discourse begins with bad habits and can be laid to rest only with habit revision. This course aspires to initiate good habits in argument assessment, data evaluation, and respectful disagreement in the first semester of Freshman year. We cover four "dangerous" topics in three-week units. In the first run of the course (Fall 2024), we covered arguments that meritocracy is a myth, that some versions of colonization are good, that America needs less democracy, and that the sex binary should determine transgender sports participation.
Syllabus
Humanomics courses are premised on the idea that social science and the humanities are not locked in a zero-sum competition, but can instead be combined in classrooms and inquiries to yield something greater than their separate parts alone. All Humanomics courses are taught by two professors from separate disciplines who run every class session together. It is the only meaningfully interdisciplinary teaching I have ever had the privilege to do.