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Syllabus 2008–09

Fall 2008

The core reading for the Fall 2008 semester will be:

1. The Book of Genesis
2. Plato: The Republic
3. St. Augustine: Confessions
4. Ibn Tufayl: The Story of Hayy bin Yaqzan
5. Galileo Galilei: The Starry Messenger and Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
6. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: First I Dream
7. Rene Descartes: Discourse on Method
8. John Locke: Second Treatise on Civil Government
9. Denis Diderot: Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage
10. Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
11. Voltaire: Candide

The core reading list for the Spring 2009 semester will be:

1. Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility
2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
3. Immanuel Kant: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
4. William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
5. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
6. Friedrich Nietzsche: Also Sprach Zarathustra
7. Karl Marx: Essay on Estranged Labor, and The Communist Manifesto
8. Max Weber: Selections from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
9. Albert Einstein: Relativity, along with
10. Werner Heisenberg: The Development of Philosophical Ideas Since Descartes
11. in Comparison with the New Situation in Quantum Theory
12. Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents
13. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse