In this six-week course delivered by Marianne Talbot, you will learn all about arguments, how to identify and evaluate them, and how not to mistake bad arguments for good.
In this introduction to ethics, we shall be considering the underpinnings of ethical thought. We shall consider, for example, what it is for an action to be right or wrong, whether we can have moral knowledge and whether freewill is essential to morality.
We shall reflect on four key ethical theories (virtue ethics, deontology, non-cognitivism and utilitarianism), looking at both their strengths and their weaknesses. We shall be looking at morality in the context of the individual and the context of society.
"Course Description This subject introduces the history of science from antiquity to the present. Students consider the impact of philosophy, art, magic, social structure, and folk knowledge on the development of what has come to be called "science" in the Western tradition, including those fields today designated as physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, astronomy and the mind sciences. Topics include concepts of matter, nature, motion, body, heavens, and mind as these have been shaped over the course of history. Students read original works by Aristotle, Vesalius, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, among others."
"Course Description We will explore the changing political choices and ethical dilemmas of American scientists from the atomic scientists of World War II to biologists in the present wrestling with the questions raised by cloning and other biotechnologies. As well as asking how we would behave if confronted with the same choices, we will try to understand the choices scientists have made by seeing them in their historical and political contexts. Some of the topics covered include: the original development of nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the effects of the Cold War on American science; the space shuttle disasters; debates on the use of nuclear power, wind power, and biofuels; abuse of human subjects in psychological and other experiments; deliberations on genetically modified food, the human genome project, human cloning, embryonic stem cell research; and the ethics of archaeological science in light of controversies over museum collections."
"Course Description This course serves as an in-depth look at literacy theory in media contexts, from its origins in ancient Greece to its functions and changes in the current age of digital media, participatory cultures, and technologized learning environments. Students will move quickly through traditional historical accounts of print literacies; the majority of the semester will focus on treating literacy as more than a functional skill (i.e., one's ability to read and write) and instead as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces. These new media literacies include the practices and concepts of: fan fiction writing, online social networking, videogaming, appropriation and remixing, transmedia navigation, multitasking, performance, distributed cognition, and collective intelligence. Assignments include weekly reading and writing assignments and an original research project. Readings will include Plato, Goody and Watt, Scribner and Cole, Graff, Brandt, Heath, Lemke, Gee, Alvermann, Jenkins, Hobbs, Pratt, Leander, Dyson, Levy, Kress, and Lankshear and Knobel."
"COURSE DESCRIPTION A series of 5 lectures from various economists and political analysts examining the roots, results, and responses to financial crises."
