Harman Academy for Polymathic Study, DML 241

“I’m not a robot, I have feelings” – how many times have you heard that phrase uttered? We tend to define our humanity by our ability to feel complicated and intense emotions. However, what if we were able to program robots to experience and empathize with a range of human emotions? Robots are often the stuff of dystopic nightmare, but what if they were able to comprehend human emotion on a level that could help other human beings and aid individuals through social interaction? What if they were even able to provide new insights into human behavior? Does the potential...

Love. Sexuality. Sex. Gender. Historically, Western culture has demarcated these ideas to fit within specific frameworks—pure love resists sexual desire; proper sexuality fits only within a firm heterosexual binary; and sex, if indulged in, should abide by very rigid institutionalized rules. But our understanding of love, sex, and sexuality is transforming right before our eyes. As our perceptions of sexuality and the psychology of sexual desire shifts, so too do our perceptions of what constitutes loving. Joe Boone has explored how a literature of love shifted with the changing...

Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare as an ongoing and necessary expression of the state originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley thousands of years before the Common Era.  The twentieth century witnessed global, regional, and local war on a near-continuous basis.  For ten of the first fourteen years of the twenty-first century the United States has been at war in the Middle East.  The threat of terrorism, meanwhile, remains continuous and has altered the social psychology of these United States in ways that we have only...

A philosophy of ethics implies an effort to discern the good in a specific situation and to choose it as a matter of right conduct.  Easier said than done!  How do we form our own ethical standards?  What are the roles played in this process by religion, family, ethnicity, society, and law? How does one deal with the cacophony of opposed positions on so many ethical points?  Is the search for ethics in our contemporary society of necessity a highly personalized struggle: energized by tradition, perhaps, but made real, made functional, by experience, hard knocks, and choice...

Ours is an age that prizes privacy.  Yet we also inherit a tradition, dating from ancient times, East and West, that sees the good life in terms of promoting the common good, or at the least, not detracting from it.  Politics or some form of public career has proven a time-honored pathway to such fulfillment.  Of late, however, philanthropy and other forms of non-profit public service have come to the fore as important constituents of civic value.  In this discussion, Professor Paul Lichterman will challenge students to examine from a variety of perspectives and...

Inimicus inimici mei amicus meus est, (the enemy of my enemy is my friend).  This ancient proverb proves most powerful when alliances between assumed adversaries form and contribute to social justice.  In 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, men joined forces with women to challenge patriarchy; in the 1920s, elite, conservative, Protestant white women allied with Pueblo Indians to fight for Native American religious freedom; and in the 1950s and 60s, privileged whites marched hand in hand with blacks to end racial discrimination.  In this Polymathic Pizza session on Civility...

Man is a sexual and procreative creature as well as a social animal.  From sexuality, tradition holds, came children and family formation to protect child development.  Until recently, most political philosophers began their treatise on the nature of the commonwealth or the state with a consideration of the family.  But what does the family mean today?  Have the old relationships of family, kinship, and tribe disappeared or have they been merely transmogrified?  Are new types of families being formed?  And how does a growing population of single people fit into...

Man is a social animal.  Thus Aristotle postulates friendship as a fundamental requirement for the good life.  By friendship Aristotle suggested what we moderns might call social adjustment, social connection, self-esteem in a social context, as well as just plain friends.  But what about friendship in an age of social media?  Can someone on Facebook actually list hundreds of friends and meet Aristotle’s requirements?  What, in short, does friendship mean in an age of hook ups, social media, and fiscalized relationships?  And what did the Anglican C.S....

Aristotle did not glorify riches, but he did note that dire poverty or other significant scarcity of means had a way of making the achievement of the good life more than a little bit difficult.  Some of the great religious traditions have endorsed a renunciation of wealth as a high virtue.  Enlightenment philosophers have praised the achievement of sufficient wealth as essential to the sustaining of personal sovereignty.  In the film Wall Street (1987), Gordon Gekko tells us that greed is good, and look where that left him and the country in 2008!  Under the guidance of...

Following the Greek notion that “in health alone is victory,” Aristotle lists this requirement as fundamental to the conduct of life.  Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Carlin Daley, students – fortified with a healthy serving of healthy pizza – will examine the health requirement from a variety of perspectives, including those threats to emotional and mental health intrinsic to life in these United States in the 21st century.