Objectives

Santayana put it well: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." To understand the significance of our beliefs and commitments--even to understand the significance of the questions and problems that beset us--we need to trace their sources and their history. Because ideas are expressed in social and political institutions as well as in philosophical, scientific, religious, and literary works, the program in the History of Ideas (HOID) is distinguished by its multidisciplinary approach. Since political structures and institutions are themselves articulated in vigorous intellectual debates, we need to understand the ideas that have formed and that continue to form them. HOID proposes to provide students with the historical background of the issues and values that have shaped their interests. It is intended to provide students with the skills and the knowledge, the guidance and the freedom to construct a focused and rigorous course of study, one that explores the historical transformation of a set of ideas and institutions across several traditional disciplines.

Students who successfully fulfill the requirements of the program will receive a certificate in the History of Ideas; their participation will be listed in their University transcripts.

How to Become a Program Member

Students may apply to the program in the History of Ideas any time before the end of their junior year. They are strongly encouraged to consult with the advisor in their primary concentration as well as with the director of the Program.

Committee

(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

(Fine Arts)

(American Studies)

(Near Eastern and Judaic Studies)

(English and American Literature)

(American Studies)

(Germanic and Slavic Languages)

(Sociology)

(English and American Literature)

(Legal and American Studies)

(Romance and Comparative Literature)

(English)

(Philosophy)

(History)

(Classical Studies)

(Music)

(English and American Literature)

(Romance and Comparative Literature)

(Sociology and Women's Studies)

(Politics and Sociology)

(Physics)

(History)

(Russian)

Faculty

History of Ideas.

Requirements for the Program

Students will work with the HOID advisor to form a plan of study that draws upon and develops their particular interests. Such a program might trace the history of a particular theme, problem, or tradition (e.g. Platonism: or the idea of revolution in politics, science, or the arts) or it might trace the mutual influence of distinctive approaches to a subject.

A. Students must have taken at least one course in each of the following areas:

1. Literature and the arts.

2. History, Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, and philosophy.

3. Social sciences.

B. Students must take at least five courses whose substantive theme falls within the history of ideas, as determined by the HOID advisor. These courses must meet the following distribution requirements:

1. At least two courses within the field of their primary concentration.

2. One course in a related field.

3. HOID 127a (Seminar in the History of Ideas: Case Studies, the topic varies annually).

Students are strongly encouraged to construct individual curricular programs and to include areas of study that are not presently listed (e.g., biology, chemistry, environmental studies, mathematics, physics). Since courses and faculty interests vary from year to year, the list of courses recommended for the program will change annually.

Members in the program are invited to participate in the History of Ideas Student Forum. The Forum provides the opportunity to present a problem or issue for discussion. Working individually or in groups, students propose a discussion topic and a list of readings.

Students are encouraged, but not required, to present a senior thesis. They may register for HOID 98a or b (Independent Study) to prepare their thesis.

Courses of Instruction

Usually offered every year.

Staff

Usually offered every year.

Staff

(100-199) Courses for Both Undergraduate and Graduate Students

[ hum ]

Conducts Socratic discussions--on friendship, virtue, piety, courage, sex, knowledge, poetry, and justice--between Socrates represented in Plato's early Socratic dialogues and later philosophers who addressed those topics (Kant, Aquinas, Nagel, Descartes, Rorty, Wilde). Using the evidence of the Platonic dialogues, we shall enact the Trial of Socrates. Usually offered every second year. Will be offered in the fall of 2001.

Ms. Rorty

[ hum ]

Devoted to tracing the major issues of early Western ethics: Is there a general conception of human nature and the human good? What is the relation between pleasure, virtue, and happiness? What are the conditions of responsible agency? What distinguishes voluntary from non-voluntary actions? What is the relationship between ethics and politics, between "local" and "universal" ethical norms? Usually offered every second year.

Ms. Rorty

[ hum ]

We trace the history of negative ethics, tracking transformations in conceptions of immorality: prohibitions of pollution and impurity, sin, vice, evil, malevolence, waywardness, outrageousness, incivility, criminality, and psychological pathology. What are sources of immorality? What marks a state of character as vile or despicable? Who judges? Usually offered every second year.

Ms. Rorty

[ hum ]

Brandeis faculty present case studies in the history of ideas as they affect the current agenda of their research agenda. Topics vary annually. Past topics have included conceptions of liberty and choice; conceptions of social progress; the idea of the good society; varieties of evil. Usually offered every year.

Ms. Rorty

Conceptions of public, political liberty affect ideas of individual "free will" and vice versa. We trace the history of the mutual influence of arguments for political/social liberty and those for the "inner freedom" of individual conscience. Readings range from Sophocles and Thucydides to Isaiah Berlin and include selections from Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Rousseau, Kant, Jefferson, Constitutional Amendments, Mill, Dostoyevsky, Rawls. Usually offered every second year.

Ms. Rorty

[ hum ]

The history of the aims, roles, and styles of philosophy: dialogues (Plato), investigations (Aristotle), letters (Cicero), poetry (Lucretius), spiritual and intellectual autobiography (Augustine, Rousseau), polemical articles (Aquinas), essays (Bacon and Hume), political programs (Locke, Bentham, Mill), and systematic treatises (Descartes, Kant). Usually offered every second year. Last offered in the fall of 2000.

Ms. Rorty

[ hum ]

Focusing on historical transformations in the ideal of universal equality, traces shifts in the relation between conceptions of justice and those of other ethical ideals, contrasting "Olympian justice" (Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant) with "naturalistic emergent justice" (Rousseau, Hume, Rawls, Williams). Usually offered every second year. Will be offered in the fall of 2001.

Ms. Rorty

Elective Courses

The following is a partial list of approved program courses. Other courses may be elected with the approval of the program advisor. The courses approved for the program are not all given in any one year and students are advised to consult the Course Schedule for each semester.

Classic Texts in the American Experience: Through the Civil War

Topics in the History of American Education

The Legal Boundaries of Public and Private Life

World Religions

The Nature of Human Nature

Materials Research in Archeology, I

Topics in Greek and Roman History

Classical Mythology

Love in the Middle Ages

Madness and Folly in Renaissance Literature

European Romanticism

Poetic Voices of Protest

The Rise and Fall of Humanism

Dickens and Dostoevsky

The Renaissance

Nineteenth-Century Survey

American Literature from 1832 to 1900

American Literature from 1900 to 2000

Canonical Precursors: Genesis, Homer, Sappho, Ovid, Virgil

Domains of Seventeenth-Century Performance

Romanticism I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge

Rights: Theory and Rhetoric

The Victorian Novel

Readings in the Short Novel

Nineteenth-Century Novel

Theories of the Self

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Literature

The Autobiographical Imagination

Reason and Ridicule: The Literature of Britain in the Enlightenment

Romanticism II: Byron, Shelley, and Keats

American Realism and Naturalism, 1865-1900

The Woman of Letters

Romanticism

Satire and its Uses

The Body as Text: Castiglione to Locke

History of Literary Criticism

Survey of Western Architecture

Art and the Origins of Europe

The Age of Cathedrals

The Art of Medieval England

St. Peter's and the Vatican

Art of the Early Renaissance in Italy

Renaissance Art in Northern Europe

High Art/Low Art: Modern Art and Popular Culture

History of Photography

Nineteenth-Century European Painting and Sculpture

History of Modern Sculpture

Post-Impressionism and Symbolism 1880-1910

The French Middle Ages

The Renaissance

The Seventeenth Century

The Nineteenth Century

Topics in French Fiction in Translation

The German Tradition I: Lessing to Nietzsche

German Enlightenment and Classicism

A History of Death

Introduction to East Asian Civilization

East Asia in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The Civilization of the Early Middle Ages

The Civilization of the High and Late Middle Ages

The Renaissance

Reformation Europe (1400-1600)

Science in the Ancient Medieval World

Household and Family in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1300-1800)

Ecological Imperialism: the Environmental Consequences of Early

Modern Expansion

The Scientific Revolution

Science and Technology in the Twentieth Century

European Thought and Culture: Marlowe to Mill

European Thought and Culture since Darwin

Politics of the Enlightenment

Doctors and Patients since 1789

The Literature of American History

Community and Alienation: Social Theory from Hegel to Freud

Romantic and Existentialist Political Thought

American Political Thought: From the Revolution to the Civil War

American Political Thought: From the Gilded Age through the New Deal

The Western Canon

Dante's Divine Comedy

Roman Historians

The Western Tradition as Seen through Chamber Music

A History of Music in the United States

Music and Culture: From Romanticism to the Modern Era

The Philosophy of Jewish Law

Law in the Bible and the Ancient Near East

Ethics and the Jewish Political Tradition

History of the Jews from the Maccabees to 1497

History of Anti-Judaism

Ancient Near Eastern Religion and Mythology

History and Culture of the Jews in East-Central Europe, 1914 to the Present

Introduction to Western Political Thought

Classical Political Theory

Plato

Aristotle

Introduction to Political Theory

Seminar: Ideas and Intellectuals in Politics

Utopia and Power in Modern Political Thought

Seminar: Topics in Law and Political Theory

Politics and the Novel

Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

The Short Story in Russia

The Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

Dostoevsky

Tolstoy

Russian Drama

Contemporary Social Theory

Classical and Critical Theory

Introduction to Peninsular Spanish Literature

Golden Age Drama and Society

Topics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Spanish Literature

Theater Texts and Theory I

Theater Texts and Theory II