Global Arc

See Freshman Seminar booklet or www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/fs/

This course examines the nature, causes, and consequences of inequalities of income, wealth, happiness, and life expectancy within the US and across countries. US economic inequality has surged since 1980. Women earn less than men, Black Americans earn less than Whites, the bottom 50% earns less than the top 1%, and the global middle class earns less than the poor in rich countries. Why? And what can policy do to reduce economic inequality? How does inequality affect justice? Is poverty or inequality the more serious problem? Do moral obligations to reduce inequality extend beyond national borders?

Participants in this seminar will go behind the scenes of a major university art museum with an encyclopedic collection of more than 100,000 objects from ancient to contemporary art. Sessions will focus on close looking and discussions of museum best practices and the role of the museum in the 21st century with a special emphasis on collecting.

This course will explore the crossover collaborative of bioengineering and art, presenting the notion of bioengineering as an artistic practice. A creative portrayal has the potential to humanize this highly technical field. Advancements in the field of biotechnology will be examined as potential tools to not only improve health care, but also as an art medium. The course material will expose students to organisms manipulated in an imaginative context and consider how these artistic ventures may affect public perception of emerging biomedical technologies.

This seminar explores the process of scientific inquiry by investigating the many ways in which field biologists observe and study organisms in the lab and field. We will discuss a variety of methodologies and technologies that researchers use to design thoughtful experiments and collect meaningful data. Through hands-on learning experiences in the lab and field, we will combine technology, problem-solving skills, and creativity to collect and interpret behavioral, morphological, physiological, and sensory data in living and non-living organisms. This seminar includes coordinated trips during class time to local sites in the Princeton area.

This seminar will trace the outlines of the principal nodes of American thought, culture and ideas, through an intensive encounter with American politics, religion, philosophy and music. It will direct participants' attention to the fundamental contest between Enlightenment and Puritanism in American identity, and grapple with American collegiate philosophy, the abolitionist movement, 20th-century Black intellectuals, feminism, and the contest among neo-liberalism, progressivism, and conservatism through a wide variety of readings and lively discussion.

The diameter of the observable universe is known to be about 46 billion light years. That's big! Not only is 46 billion a big number but even one light year, the distance a beam of light travels in one year, is a very long distance. How far is it? In this seminar, we will investigate the size of things starting with familiar objects having sizes we can readily grasp and carefully working our way up to the largest most distant objects in the observable universe. We will describe how these sizes and distances were first measured by scientists/philosophers as our understanding of the universe we live in evolved and matured over the years.

Suffering is a fundamental feature of the human condition. But it has been a central aim of many religious and philosophical thinkers to eliminate it altogether. We will examine the grounds of suffering and investigate the three basic ways in which various thinkers have sought to eradicate it: (1) by avoiding life's problems (from Netflix to suicide); (2) by fixing life's problems (from personal saintliness to political utopianism); or (3) by ceasing to judge anything to be problematic in the first place (from Buddhist spiritual practices to Stoic ones). Finally, we will look at those who insist that suffering should not be eliminated at all.

An examination of the meaning of Christian ethics through a study of selected contemporary moral and political issues: bioethics, capital punishment, sex and marriage, pluralism, race, class, gender, the environment, the morality of warfare, torture, and the role of religion in public life. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The most penetrating critiques of religion have the power to challenge our whole way of being and are often just as unsettling to atheists as to believers. After all, religions are more than just sets of beliefs - they are complex weaves of values, practices, narratives, social structures, and more - which tend to leave their stamp long after people have deserted their explicit creeds. This course explores some of the key critiques of Christianity - and Christian-moulded culture - to emerge in post-Enlightenment Europe, and will involve opening ourselves up to the painfully sharp critical scalpels of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kafka, and others.