Experiences to extend and complement the Blount Scholars Program foundation courses. May be repeated once for credit.
This course uses a survey of influential texts in philosophy, science, religion, political theory, and literature produced in the West over three millennia to provide students with an introductory practicum in the interpretation of texts, critical thinking, and integration of knowledge. Within this framework, students will explore the questions: What is truth? What are the various methods we use to determine truth? What does it mean to be human? What makes a person who they are? How can we create a society that works for all people? The goal of the course is to gain a fundamental knowledge of important ideas, values, and systems in place in the Western world and learn how to analyze them.
This course takes the ideas that were explored in BUI 101, such as the nature of truth and knowledge and the means by which humans search for them, the nature of the individual, the nature of society, and adds the concepts of justice, liberty, and equality in order to examine America as a social experiment in which these concepts are continually interpreted and reinterpreted. The concept of America is explored through many different voices and from insider and outsider perspectives. The texts include philosophy, poetry, novels, essays, short stories, songs, ethnohistory, and some that are difficult to categorize. The goal of this course is to learn about America’s past so that we can determine how to move into the future.
A text-centered examination of a more specific problem connected with core concepts of the first-year Foundations sequence and viewed through the methodological lens of one of the disciplines in the liberal arts. May be taken 3 times for credit.
The student will work 10 hours per week with an approved mentor/organization and complete several academic projects based on their work.
Through the trope of sight-as-knowledge, the term worldview identifies any system of ideas, beliefs, and practices used by a particular group of people at a particular time in order to inhabit and understand the space they occupy and their lives within it. The concept of a worldview is intrinsically connected to the issues that structure the Blount first-year Foundations sequence, to wit, the nature of society, the nature of the individual, the nature of the regulatory mechanisms between the two, the nature of power in its various forms, and the concept of nature itself. The Capstone Worldviews course asks senior Blount students to explore some aspect of the concept of a worldview by undertaking a series of theoretical readings and developing a critical or creative project over the course of the semester.