Fall 2009 HNRC 101: Honors Core I Information
 HNRC 101 Calendar
HNRC 101 General Syllabus
Plato's Allegory Required Reading
Unit A & B Roster
Fine Arts Events
Learning Aids
Unit A: What do we know? What do we believe? What, therefore, should we do?
Dr. Ault's Fine Arts Course
Questions to be addressed:
- Can one culture really understand another? What is culture anyway?
- What is “natural”? Is natural always good?
- Is there such a thing as ‘truth”?
- Can we know the secrets of nature? If yes, how can we make our knowledge useful?
- Who am I and how did I get that way?
Dr. Begres' Philosophy Course
( Epistemology)
We will begin an investigation into some of the problems involved in knowledge and justification, and we will consider methods suggested for their resolution. We will pay particular attention to issues such as knowledge, justification, certainty, objectivity, perception, sexism, and truth.
Our deliberation of the issues will be introduced by a discussion of rationalism (the view that all or most knowledge is obtained through reason), empiricism (the view that all or most knowledge is obtained through experience), and some of the distinct categories of knowledge, trying to understand the main distinction(s) among them. These categories will include those represented by the following purported knowledge claims:
Snow is white.
Quarks and leptons are the ultimate constituents of matter.
The sun will rise tomorrow.
God exists.
Capital punishment is immoral.
Dr. Botelho's History Course
The old English axiom, 'happy is a country that has no history', implies that much of history is made up of human actions, mostly disruptive, such as war, rebellion, and conquest. Human action, then and now, is primarily driven by a sense of 'knowing' or by strongly held convictions and beliefs. This history sub-section explores some of the ways that people in the past came to 'know' the 'truth'. We will do this in two primary ways, plus a number of secondary ones. First, we will trace the west's growing pre-occupation, between the years 1200 - 1500, with precise measurement as a way of 'knowing', such as using navigation to 'know' where you are at sea. Second, we will explore seventeenth-century England's means of 'belief' by reading God's wishes in the signs of nature - providentialism - and the course of events. Did you know that a hail storm was a sign of God's displeasure and a northern wind a sign of God's favour (that is, if you were a Protestant during the Spanish Armada)?
The goal is to gain a sense of the shifting mechanisms people in the past have used to 'know' something and to 'believe' something. Another aim is to impart the understanding that 'how do we know what we know' is more than some esoteric intellectual exercise. The conclusions reached by such mechanisms have very real consequences for the history of any nation or group of people. Because people 'believed' and 'knew', they acted; leaving the English to conclude that there are no happy countries.
Dr. Botelho's History Syllabus for Unit A
Dr. Emerick's Literature Course
This section of HC 101 will focus on the way that writers of fiction and drama have explored questions about how we know who we are and what we believe: Who am I? How did I get to be who I am? What do I know? What do I believe? What is the truth?
Specifically, we will look at several young people and their attempts to understand who they are, what has happened to them , and what their roles in life will be. They seek the answers to such questions as “Why did my mother abandon me?” “Am I destined to be a prophet?” and “Did I contribute to the death of another human being?”
Imaginative writers often explore questions of knowledge and truth in complex ways. In Robert Penn Warren’s novel, All the King’s Men, Jack Burden, the main character, claims that “Life is motion toward knowledge,” and that all of us seek to learn the truth. Jack continues: “I had to know the truth. For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you barely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge to blackness. For there is a blackness to truth, too.” Thus, the search for knowledge and truth is not always easy, and we don’t always like what we find out. But taking the journey is irresistible.
Texts:
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
Gail Godwin, Father Melancholy’s Daughter
Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (in Three)
Reynolds Price, The Tongues of Angels
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Richard Wright, Black Boy
Dr. Emerick's Literature Syllabus for Unit A
Dr. Marsden's Literature Course
For general course requirements and goals, it is vital that you consult the general syllabus.
The core questions for Unit A beg a further set of questions: What don’t we know? In what do we disbelieve? How do we know what we know? How do we know that we know it? In others words, the questions posed are epistemological in nature (epistemology constitutes essentially the philosophy of knowledge and, more broadly interpreted, the question of how we “know” or make sense of the world). Thus epistemological problems and disagreements are fundamentally different than “learning stuff” or distinguishing between facts and errors in fact.
This section of Unit A will focus on how literature raises and responds to these issues. We will look generally at how interpreting (or the “work” of interpreting) a work of literature illustrates the larger issues of understanding or interpreting the world in general. We will look at an example of detective fiction—the genre par excellence in terms of piecing together clues to gather information from which knowledge may be derived. Our primary focus, though, will be on two examples of what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographical metafiction,” a subgenre of postmodernist literature; that is, fiction that raises questions about how we can understand the world (in this instance of the past) and questions about what constitutes (historical) knowledge, truth and reality. Such questions are elemental to contemporary fiction, particularly contemporary British fiction.
What, therefore, should I do? Price, one of the narrator’s students in Waterland, asks of his teacher, with some irony: “so the French Revolution never really happened?” We might paraphrase his position by asking “so the Holocaust never really happened?” We live in an age of uncertainty (or, to use the theoretical jargon, “indeterminacy”). While assumptions about knowledge have been questioned by contemporary literature, it is clear that we bear some responsibility for establishing a foundation for such knowledge. Among other issues in this section of HC101, we’ll examine what historical developments allow for questions such as the one posed by Price, and we’ll explore ways in which we might develop a response.
In considering all of this, we will satisfy the larger goals of Honors Core as established in the general syllabus: developing writing, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Dr. Marsden's Syllabus for Unit A
Unit A Syllabi
Unit B: How do we discern the good from the bad? What, therefore, should we do?
Dr. Ault's Fine Arts Course
Questions to be addressed:
- What is ‘progress’? Are we progressing?
- What is a good leader or government?
- What is happiness? Is it external or internal?
- What should the goal of a society be?
- Is ethics all relative? Can’t there be absolutes?
Dr. Begres' Philosophy Course
( Ethics)
This unit will be a short investigation of the above-stated question from the perspective of normative theories and philosophers. You will be introduced to, and asked to evaluate, the theories of some of the major philosophers of ethics and you will become familiar with some of the more compelling problems in the field. You will come to see contemporary ethics as a significant part of an old philosophical tradition that remains applicable to lives and actions.
Dr. Botelho's History Course
This class explores the unit’s central question, ‘How Do We Tell The Good From The Bad?’, through an examination of key and classic text in the areas of Justice, God, and Government. Most readings will be short and self-contained, a few will be excerpts from larger arguments, and two will be in their entirety and discussed over several days. In all cases, they represent paradigm-shifting or paradigm-challenging arguments. They are drawn from across both time and space, from Aristotle to Feynman, from Thomas Jefferson to Hannah Arendt, and from the Bible and the Koran. In all cases, we approach the arguments of these people in the spirit of intellectual honesty, curiosity, and respect. And while you will undoubtedly disagree with many of them, you should come away from your engagement with them having learned something about how the world works, and about how you work within the world.
Dr. Botelho's History Syllabus for Unit B
Dr. Emerick's Literature Course
This section will explore the dynamics of good and bad in relation to the theme of crime and punishment in imaginative literature. We will examine the portrayals of a number of crimes that are punishable by law, such as murder, rape, assault, and theft, as well as some immoral actions that may not be punishable by law, such as dishonesty and deceit. We will also consider the role of guilt in the literature of crime and punishment. The guilty may suffer legal consequences, or self-inflicted punishment, or a combination of the two.
Questions to explore will include the following: Are moral behavior and immoral behavior relative? Is crime always bad? Is punishment always good? Are all crimes unpardonable, or are there times when crime is pardonable? Are there positive as well as negative outcomes to crime? What constitutes punishment, and are there good and bad outcomes resulting from punishment? Who is a criminal? Are there good and bad criminals? What impact does guilt have on the criminal? Is guilt beneficial or harmful?
Texts:
Neil Browne, Asking the Right Questions
Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor”
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet
Richard Wright, Native Son
Dr. Emerick's Literature Syllabus for Unit B
Dr. Marsden's Literature Course
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are either well-written or badly written. -- Oscar Wilde
For general course requirements and goals, it is vital that you consult the general syllabus.
The question posed in Unit B is fundamentally ethical as distinct from epistemological (Unit A) or aesthetic (that is not to say, of course, that questions of aesthetics and epistemology have no ethical dimension) In this section will focus on how literature raises, complicates, and responds to questions a variety of ethical issues. In particular we will consider such questions as:
Is Oscar Wilde correct in his evaluation? Can a book be unethical or ethical? What do we mean by “good?” What do we mean by “bad.” Literature is one of the humanities; do we become more “human” as a result of reading literature? How is it, then, that unethical people may be connoisseurs of the “great” works of literature? What can we learn about ethics through reading literature (as distinct from philosophy or history)? How do we delineate a distinction between the good and the bad through understanding the actions of those represented in literature?
In contemplating these and other questions, we will read two novels, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and John Updike’s Terrorist: A Novel. In addition we will read a variety of shorter pieces in various genres to be distributed by me, beginning with Philip Larkin’s wonderful poem, “High Windows.”
Dr. Marsden's Syllabus for Unit B
Unit B Syllabi
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