HUM 101W-3: Introduction to the Humanities W/B-HUM
Department of Humanities, AQ 5115, 778-782-3689
Semester: Summer 2009 (1094), D1, Burnaby
Instructor: Chris Jones, AQ 5110, 778-782-5516, cjones2@sfu.ca
Prerequisites: None.
Course Description:
In the humanities we explore some of the most important ideas that individual minds have conceived from antiquity to our own day, in order to question and understand human society, past and present. The humanities, then, is comprised of those academic disciplines concerned with the study of the human condition (i.e. with what it means to be human). In this course we shall undertake to do a systematic reading of a number of texts in relation to the following topics: the articulation of competing versions of moral choice; the relationship of reason to the realm of the emotions; the relationship of the public to the private sphere; the meaning of self-hood; and the relationship of the individual to the family, the community, the state, to nature and to God.
Required Texts:
Sophocles, Antigone
Aristotle, Ethics
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Pascal, Pensées
Thomas More, Utopia
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Course Requirements:
Participation 15%
Quizzes 10%
Three 3-page papers (15% each) 45%
Final Exam 30%