Global Arc

This is mainly a seminar in normative political theory insofar as it intersects with legal philosophy: its aim is to study, discuss and challenge some main contemporary (and occasionally, classical) legal conceptions of fundamental values posited in liberal and political theory. Of course, law is not the only, perhaps not even the most important, instrument for giving effect to liberal-democratic values, but it is certainly an indispensable guarantee of those ideals. Liberty under law, equality, justice and legitimacy: these will be four central themes of the seminar. Taken together, they cohere into an attractive vision of the rule of law.

This seminar will explore how both personal values and public life are influenced by what we see, hear, and read in public media, both digital and on the printed page. Students will examine the challenges and opportunities that today's rapidly evolving media landscape present to freedom of the press, and to the democracy that the media serve. Discussion will focus on where facts about society come from & how citizens can best assess the credibility of individual news reports. Students will craft strategies for determining their own personal media diet and for bringing their values into the public conversation.

This course engages with a relatively recent literature on the ethics of human enhancement, specifically enhancements related to cognition, in four units. The first unit focuses on basic terms in the debate: for instance, what do we mean by "enhancement," "treatment," and "cognition"? The second unit addresses some questions in the literature, including whether or not we have (or would have) a duty to enhance ourselves given certain technologies. The third unit explores some political ramifications of enhancement, including eugenic and distributive concerns. The fourth unit will focus on present-day case studies, through group presentations.

Surveying a range of ancient and modern discourses, we will think together about the following questions: What is slavery? Who can be a slave? Why does slavery exist? What is the relationship between slavery and race? Gender? Religion? We will encounter several views on these questions, attending to how they emerge in historical context. Beginning with ancient Greek and Roman accounts of slavery and freedom, we will develop some conceptual tools to analyze medieval and modern theories and practices of slavery, including the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and Africans and the American anti-slavery movement.

The concept of privacy has a prominent role in contemporary discussions of technological innovation. Yet privacy's presence in American law is nothing new. This seminar will introduce participants to the varied ways in which, for better or worse, concepts of privacy - we will term them physical, informational, decisional, intellectual, proprietary, and associational concepts of privacy - manifest in U.S. constitutional, tort and statutory law, from the Founding era of the 18th century to the Digital era of the 21st century.

This course provides a non-exhaustive overview of key topics and methodologies in cognitive science, as seen through the lens of understanding the structure of thought. Topics will include logical and probabilistic reasoning in infants, animals and the unconscious. Our main goal will be to understand the formats of thought (imagistic, probabilistic, language of thought) and structures of thought.

This course considers the impact of medical history, its advances and effects, in various historical periods and in dialogue with literary representations of human experience. Starting with definitions of medical humanities (in technology, philosophy, social sciences and religious studies), we explore medical history in diverse literary texts chosen from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From our readings and discussions,we will gain an understanding of how medicine and the humanities are, in fact, inextricably linked.

Few concepts in the theory of art and literature have been as long-lived, as influential and yet as obscure as mimesis. In what sense does mimesis imply likeness, artifice, making or performance? To what degree is it a natural or human phenomenon? What, finally, is the role of the production and recognition of mimesis in understanding? We'll discuss some ancient, medieval, and modern approaches to these questions, studying works of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. The arts to be considered include poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance.

This course uncovers the migrant radical tradition at the heart of global history. Examining novels, films and ethnographies of 20th - century migrations alongside forensic reports, poetry and footage produced by recent border-crossers, we will trace how mobile subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial militants - have shaped new identities, political geographies and emancipatory futures. We will situate border regimes in relation to practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the factory and, finally, we will ask: why did we stop seeing migrants as political subjects and start treating them like humanitarian ones?

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.