Documents Page

This course relates principles of environmental science to our daily activities, with an eye to sustainability, conservation, and systems thinking. It introduces science as a process of inquiry and discovery rather than just a pre-established set of facts. Topics relate to energy, water, and land use, and include food, electric power, materials, buildings, transportation, and waste.

Requisites - None

Breadth - Physical Science

Level - Elementary

Counts as L&S Credit

This is introductory science course for non-science majors provides an overview of scientific discovery and the nature of science. It will explore science as a process of inquiry through five broad scientific concepts representing a range of disciplines: astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, and ecology/atmospheric sciences.

Requisites - None

Breadth - Physical Science

Level - Elementary

Counts as L&S Credit

What does it mean to think critically? To find fault? To employ intellectual rigor? Can we imagine a method of critical thought that produces writing with the potential to change the world? This course takes the definition of “critical thought” seriously in order to expand our idea of what critical communication is and has the potential to be. Explores the three modes of argument and expression: verbal, visual, numerical. Students engage in critical thinking about how these modes are structured and used. Practice in, and interpretation of, the three modes.

Requisite: Satisfied Communications A requirement

Breadth - Humanities

Level - Elementary

Counts as L&S Credit

This course fulfills the Communications B requirement.

What does science have to do with religion? What does it mean to have expertise about the natural world? And what difference do politics and funding sources make to scientific investigation? Learn how to think critically and historically about science in this course by exploring such fundamental questions across two millennia. We begin with ancient mythology and philosophy, then follow the movement of the Greek classical tradition into medieval Islam and Christendom, and finally turn to the ‘revolution’ in science of the 16th and 17th centuries with Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. These historical investigations provide vital insights into ideas of the ‘natural’, scientific observation, and experiment, as well as into our expectations of scientific knowledge and the scientific enterprise.

Requisites: Not open to students with credit for HIST SCI 201.

Breadth - Natural Science

Level - Elementary

Counts as L&S Credit

ILS 202 offers an introduction to the history of the sciences between the late seventeenth century and the early twentieth century, with the aim of understanding the varied ways of knowing that have come to be known as “science.” We will ask: What does it mean to know something about nature? How can we be sure this knowledge is secure? And what is this “scientific” knowledge of nature good for, according to people in particular times and places? In pursuing these questions, we will treat such pivotal intellectual developments as Newtonianism, the conservation of energy, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. At the same time, we will seek to understand the relationship between these ideas and the broader cultural context in which they took place, paying particular attention to the ways it was possible to “do science” in different times and places.

Requisites: Not open to students with credit for HIST SCI 202 or 404

Breadth - Natural Science

Level - Elementary

Counts as L&S Credit

ILS 203 is a survey of Western literature and art from classical antiquity to the medieval period, with a substantial emphasis on the textual and material remains from ancient Greece and Rome. It will provide a foundational knowledge of some of the works of art and literature that have shaped the Western intellectual tradition, as well as challenge students to contextualize their own attitudes and beliefs.

Requisites - None

Breadth - Literature

Level - Elementary

Counts as L&S Credit