Should Art Be Moral? The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry

Recipient: Alznauer, Mark Vinzenz (Evanston, IL 60208-2214 USA) in affiliation with Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208 USA)

Goal: The development of a one-semester course that would be offered at least twice, for twenty undergraduates, on the question of the moral value of art.

Description: In this seminar-style course, we will look at some of the most prominent episodes of what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" in order to compass the alternative answers given to the perennial question: should art be moral? In pursuing this question, we will examine both the works of art that have figured most prominently in this debate as well as the philosophic and literary disputes that have followed in their wake. The course is comprised of three units. The first concerns the pre-modern background of the quarrel and will include readings from Sophocles, Plato, and Dante, among others. The second unit deals with the reemergence of this debate in modern writers such as Moliere, Rousseau, Schiller and Nietzsche. In the last unit, we turn to five late modern poets and writers who have explicitly treated the relation of morality to their art: Tolstoy, Brecht, Eliot, Woolf and O'Connor.

Grant: 196724 / AQ-50099-10,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2010

Course on Happiness: under the Enduring Questions Pilot Course Program

Recipient: Minkov, Svetozar Yuliyanov (CHICAGO, IL 60605-1394 USA) in affiliation with Roosevelt University (Chicago, IL 60605 USA)

Goal: Development of an undergraduate course on the nature of happiness and fulfillment, as explored through the works of Greek, English, and French theorists.

Description: Design and teach at Roosevelt University (at least twice) a course on the enduring issue of happiness.

Grant: 196630 / AQ-50005-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enduring Questions Course on Evil

Recipient: Wolfe, Alan (Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 USA) in affiliation with Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA 02167 USA)

Goal: The development of a seminar that scrutinizes conceptions of evil from antiquity to the twenty-first century.

Description: I propose to teach a course on evil. Students will be asked to read and discuss three main bodies of readings: classic texts including Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton, and Kant; mid twentieth century reflections on the Holocaust and the Cold War (Arendt, Niebuhr, Primo Levi); and accounts by historians and social scientists dealing with contemporary examples of terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The aim of the course is to discover whether Christian theology, Enlightenment moral philosophy, and the insights of great poets offer us appropriate tools for thinking clearly about the problem of evil in the world today. Some contemporary thinkers argue that they do not; we need new approaches, they insist, such as those offered by sociobiology, neuropsychology, or behavioral economics. I hope that the students will discover through this course that great works of the human imagination and spirit do have enduring value.

Grant: 196635 / AQ-50010-09,   Category: Political Science,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enduring Questions: What Is Freedom?

Recipient: Gans, Bruce Michael (Chicago, IL 60634 USA) in affiliation with City Colleges of Chicago, Wilbur Wright College (Chicago, IL 60634-1500 USA)

Goal: The development of a course that would examine the question: what is freedom?

Description: This proposed Enduring Questions course will explore the question:What Is Freedom? The course aims to equip students to construct their own definition of freedom by lending help in grasping the contrasting answers conceived over the millennia in immortal works in philosophy, psychology, political science, religion and literature. The course will employ reading, discussion, writing and ancillary activities to engage students in such questions as; to what degree is freedom a function of the surrounding world and to what degree a function of one's inner spiritual evolution and values? Works examined include the Exodus, Satyricon, Souls of Black Folks, Up From Slavery, the Apology of Socrates, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Bhagavad Gita, Schopenhauer's Wisdom of Life, Epictetus, Labyrinths of Solitude, Communist Manifesto and Civilization and Its Discontents. This course will make a profound impact because its target audience is inner city community college students.

Grant: 196636 / AQ-50011-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Questions of Happiness: Philosophy, Cinema, and Literature

Recipient: Haskins, Casey (Purchase, NY 10577-1402 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, College at Purchase (Purchase, NY 10577 USA)

Goal: The development of a course for undergraduates exploring the meaning and attainability of human happiness.

Description: This course will examine the question "What is happiness?," using a variety of ancient and modern literary and philosophical works as well as films of diverse genres. Although this question is a staple of philosophical ethics courses, the importance of "Questions of Happiness" is that its approach will be both more interdisciplinary and "predisciplinary" than a traditional philosophy course. Its relation to larger issues in the humanities is methodological: rather than using strictly philosophical texts, it will use paired films and texts that will be juxtaposed along the axes of traditional vs. contemporary & philosophical vs. literary/cinematic. It is designed for all students, regardless of major, who seek to broaden their sense of the possibilities of human experience, as well as students who are already specifically studying film, literature, or philosophy.

Grant: 196639 / AQ-50014-09,   Category: Philosophy,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

"The Art of Leadership" new Humanities course

Recipient: Weeks, David (Azusa, CA 91702-2701 USA) in affiliation with Azusa Pacific University

Goal: The development of an undergraduate course that would examine a series of questions centered on leadership.

Description: The new humanities course, ???The Art of Leadership??? will explore several enduring and exciting questions: Who is a good leader? What does a good leader do? How does one prepare to lead? What ought to be the aim of good leaders? What is human nature, and does it affect leadership? Is leadership an art or a science? What is practical wisdom, and how does one obtain it? Are leaders constrained by any boundaries or obligations? Is virtue essential to good leadership? Is vice ever necessary? How should one lead in a situation that is less than best? Students mastering course material will be better able to: read and interpret great works; analyze and critique texts, ideas, and arguments; approach intellectual inquiry in an integrative and pre-disciplinary fashion; compare and contrast great works from different cultures and eras; and develop skills essential a liberal arts education: critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and effective communication.

Grant: 196644 / AQ-50019-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Cosmos or Chaos: Views of the World, Views of the Good Life

Recipient: Cooper, Laurence David (Northfield, MN 55057 USA) in affiliation with Carleton College

Goal: The development of a freshman seminar at Carleton College that focuses on what it means to live well and whether the structure of the universe supports human efforts to live well.

Description: This project will develop a new freshman seminar, Cosmos or Chaos: Views of the World, Views of the Good Life, which addresses the question of the good life ??? what does it mean to live well? ??? by considering two prior questions: 1) What is the fundamental character of the world? and 2) What are the implications of this character for human beings? The importance of one???s view of the fundamental character of the universe and of the good life, while not self-evident, has been addressed with great intellectual, moral, poetic, and spiritual power by thinkers throughout history. This course will consider some key visions of the character of the world and of how to live a good life. Students enrolled in the course will read, discuss, and write extensively about Homer, Sophocles, the Biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, Plato and Aristotle, the Gospel of Matthew and Augustine???s Confessions, Niccolo Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, Nietzsche, Walker Percy, Hans Jonas, and Ken Wilber.

Grant: 196682 / AQ-50057-09,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

What Is a Just Society?

Recipient: Jopp, Jennifer (Salem, OR 97301 USA) in affiliation with Willamette University

Goal: Development of a lower division undergraduate course addressing issues related to justice, just society, and what makes justice prevail.

Description: This course engages students in a consideration of justice and the role of justice in the construction of politics. We will ask: what is a just society? How might justice be measured? Attained? Maintained? Beginning with the REPUBLIC of Plato, the students will engage with philosophers and thinkers across many centuries who have pondered how best to construct a society that fosters justice. Touching as it does on many themes, the course will have students read works that encourage them to grapple with the related themes of the role of faith and reason in society, the possibilities for equality in human society, the nature of man, and the processes by which we might bring our ideal visions of society closer to fruition. Reading works by authors as diverse as Plato, Saint Augustine, Christine de Pizan, William Godwin, and John Rawls, students will-alone, together, and in larger forums-engage in wide-ranging discussions of the nature of the human quest for justice.

Grant: 196711 / AQ-50086-09,   Category: History,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Liberty and Justice in the Contemporary World

Recipient: Staley, Kevin M (Manchester, NH 03102-1310 USA) in affiliation with St. Anselm College (Manchester, NH 03102 USA)

Goal: The preparation and teaching of an undergraduate course in liberty and justice in the contemporary world.

Description: Saint Anselm College proposes to develop a course entitled "Liberty and Justice in the Contemporary World." Our proposal is developed through Saint Anselm's Learning Liberty Initiative, which joins concern for civic and political life with our liberal arts mission. "Liberty and Justice in the Contemporary World" will be offered as an upper-level elective in the College's Humanities program, and will be taught by a team of faculty from five different departments. Our course examines four enduring questions of human nature, liberty, and justice by drawing on seminal texts in the Western intellectual tradition. We seek funding to: a) facilitate faculty discussion and planning of the course's reading list, themes, questions, and pedagogy; b) provide faculty release time for the initial running of the course; and c) fund community-based research elements in the course.

Grant: 196779 / AQ-50154-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enduring Questions in the Humanities: Mortality and Meaning, God and Suffering

Recipient: Howland, Jacob A (Tulsa, OK 74104-9700 USA) in affiliation with University of Tulsa (Tulsa, OK 74104 USA)

Goal: The development of a freshman-level undergraduate course on the interrelated issues of mortality and meaning, God and suffering.

Description: The course envisioned is a sustained exploration and discussion of two closely related sets of core issues that concern us simply insofar as we are human: (1) Mortality and Meaning. Does death negate the meaning of a human life? Or can death give life meaning, and if so, how? What can confronting death teach us about life? (2) God and Suffering. Why do we suffer? Does the Bible help to make sense of suffering? If not, is faith still possible for a thoughtful human being? On another level, the course is an introduction to humanistic and liberating education as such. The readings tentatively selected aim to promote dialogue by tracing the lines of tension between pre-modern and modern perspectives, and between revelation and unaided reason. The readings often anticipate later issues and revisit earlier ones. They span a range of genres, including philosophical dialogues and treatises, scripture, oratory, poetry, drama, and autobiography.

Grant: 196627 / AQ-50002-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enduring Values: Gilgamesh to Frankenstein

Recipient: Freeman, Philip (Decorah, IA 52101 USA) in affiliation with Luther College

Goal: The preparation and teaching of an undergraduate seminar addressing questions of friendship, love, and human dignity.

Description: The Luther College course Enduring Questions: From Gilgamesh to Frankenstein, is an exploration of crucial questions through the careful reading of key works from some of the greatest minds in human history. This seminar course will ask what is the nature of love and friendship, and what do we mean by human dignity? Students will read The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Antigone of Socrates, several Platonic dialogues, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Dante???s Inferno, Machiavelli???s The Prince, Shakespeare???s King Lear, Swift???s Gulliver???s Travels, Mary Wollstonecraft???s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Mary Shelley???s Frankenstein. The readings will be supplemented by attendance at local artistic and dramatic events and by the study of material artifacts in museums.

Grant: 196743 / AQ-50118-09,   Category: Classics,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Gandhi and Western Classics

Recipient: Colmo, Christopher A (River Forest, IL 60305 USA) in affiliation with Dominican University (River Forest, IL 60305-1099 USA)

Goal: The preparation and teaching of a senior-level undergraduate seminar that addresses the question of justice through works by Gandhi and classical Western philosophers.

Description: The proposed course will engage students in inquiry on the question "What is justice?" through a comparison of Gandhi and two Stoic philosophers, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, as well as Plato, Aristotle, and Tolstoy. Themes likely to emerge from this discussion include (1) the nature of and basis for universal claims about justice and a common human family; (2) the relation between non-violence and the primacy of morality as a human good, and (3) the competing claims of emotion and reason in defining justice. The discussion format of the course presupposes the creation of a pre-disciplinary community of inquiry rather than an expert presentation by a professional in a discipline. Shared textual inquiry will be partnered with discussion of Richard Attenborough???s film and Philip Glass???s opera about Gandhi, thereby expanding discussion to include the aesthetic. Students will also have occasion to engage in cross-cultural dialogue about the meaning of justice.

Grant: 196651 / AQ-50026-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Question of Justice: From the Piraeus to the Mountaintop

Recipient: Busch, Peter Benjamin (Villanova, PA 19085 USA) in affiliation with Villanova University

Goal: The preparation and teaching of a sophomore-level undergraduate course on the question of justice.

Description: This seminar is dedicated to studying the enduring question, "What is justice?" In order to investigate the question with the care it requires, we will follow the lead of Plato's Republic, the dialogue in which Socrates stays down in the Piraeus (the port of Athens) for an all-night conversation about justice. Each unit of the course will take as its starting point one of the major views of justice offered by the men with whom Socrates converses at the beginning of the dialogue. Rather than taking that conversation for granted, however, we will proceed to illustrate, complicate and challenge it with texts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sophocles, and Frederick Douglass, among others. The course ends with a perspective perhaps very different from that of Socrates: the view of justice taken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop."

Grant: 196797 / AQ-50172-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Do we need God for the good life?

Recipient: Austin, Michael Warren (Richmond, KY 40475 USA) in affiliation with Eastern Kentucky University

Goal: The development of an undergraduate course that addresses issues relating to the good life, including God's existence or non-existence, human nature, human fulfillment, and moral growth.

Description: The enduring question to be addressed in this course is "Do we need God for the good life?" By examining this question from a variety of perspectives, students in this course will not only appreciate the pluralism that exists with respect to the possible answers to this question, but they will also see how a variety of disciplines relate to it. The readings and discussion in class will draw from texts in philosophy, religion, biology, history, and literature.

Grant: 196643 / AQ-50018-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enduring Questions: Pilot Course on "Nature and Culture"

Recipient: Helmreich, Anne L (Cleveland Heights, OH 44121 USA) in affiliation with Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH 44106 USA)

Goal: The preparation and teaching of an undergraduate seminar on nature and culture.

Description: The project prepares students for future decisions regarding the environment by engaging them with the past so that they can better understand how ideas and attitudes emerged today. Students will gain skills in critical thinking as well as verbal and written expression. The project focuses on how culture expresses humanity???s relationship with the natural world by addressing three key themes shared by literature and art: the garden, the paired tropes of the pastoral and the georgic, and the wilderness. Each theme is explored through primary texts and related art works. Project readings and discussion, site visits to the Cleveland Museum of Art and Lakeview cemetery are augmented by guest lectures by local scholars and a nationally recognized expert, the latter sponsored through the auspices of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

Grant: 196672 / AQ-50047-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Individualism and Its Dangers (course title)

Recipient: Zakaras, Alex Michael (Burlington, VT 05405 USA) in affiliation with University of Vermont

Goal: A one-semester seminar to be offered at least twice, to undergraduates, on the problem of individualism and its dangers.

Description: I am proposing to develop a course for first-year undergraduates at the University of Vermont. The course is pre-disciplinary and addresses several questions of enduring moral and political importance: Which forms of individualism, if any, are worth aspiring to? What are their dangers? And which forms should be resisted?

Grant: 196748 / AQ-50123-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

On Human Dignity

Recipient: Punzo, Vincent (Richmond, IN 47374 USA) in affiliation with Earlham College

Goal: The development of a freshman-level seminar on notions of human dignity in fiction, non-fiction, and philosophy.

Description: The purpose of this course will be to provide students an opportunity to engage in readings and discussions exploring the meaning, value, significance, and utility of the notion of human dignity. The course will focus on both the lived experience of human dignity as well as philosophical and psychological issues that are raised by the notion of inherent human dignity.

Grant: 196687 / AQ-50062-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Confronting Mortality

Recipient: Busch, Austin (Brockport, NY 14420 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, Brockport

Goal: The development of a junior-level undergraduate course dealing with issues of death, the afterlife, mourning, suicide, and the impact of biomedical advances on understanding death.

Description: ???Confronting Mortality??? encourages students to consider the implications of human mortality through an ambitious program of reading that addresses the following issues: the plausibility of life after death, public and private mourning and consolation, the ethical permissibility of suicide, and the effects of biomedical advances on our understanding of death. Readings include Greco-Roman poetic and philosophical texts; religious and philosophical writings from the Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions; pre-20th century European philosophy; 19th century Russian and British narrative and lyric; and brief forays into 20th century philosophical and ethical writings. This junior level English course will also be proposed as a Contemporary Issues course meeting General Education requirements. The course will be offered twice during the project period of July 1, 2009 - December 31, 2010.

Grant: 196646 / AQ-50021-09,   Category: Literature,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

What Is Happiness?

Recipient: Rachlin, Nathalie (Claremont, CA 91711 USA) in affiliation with Scripps College

Goal: The development of a course that explores the question, What is happiness? by taking a historical overview of its changing interpretations from Greek antiquity to the present day.

Description: Most people seem to agree that happiness is one of life???s most important goals, yet they do not know how to achieve it. What is it about happiness that makes the concept and perhaps its reality so elusive? In the last two decades, social scientists, mostly psychologists and economists, have done much research on the topic that was once primarily the domain of philosophy, ethics, and religion. The ???hard??? science of happiness is still in its infancy, but neurobiologists are starting to understand the chemistry of happiness. Yet, for all our scientific findings, the concept of happiness remains as mysterious and contradictory as it was for the ancient Greeks. Through an exploration of the ways in which thinkers across time, across cultures, and across disciplines have tried to answer the question ???What is happiness????, this course aims to provide students with a set of conceptual tools and research findings that informs their own reflections on what it means to be happy.

Grant: 196658 / AQ-50033-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009

"The Meanings of Life: Ancient Visions"

Recipient: McCurry, Jeffrey (Pittsburgh, PA 15282 USA) in affiliation with Duquesne University

Goal: The development of an undergraduate course on the meaning of life, focusing on writings from ancient Greece and Rome.

Description: This project aims to develop a course exploring nine different versions of how to live a life worth living by reading several works of ancient literature, history, and philosophy. By studying Homer, Sappho, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, and Augustine, students will learn how to think analytically about the fundamental question of the meaning of life by joining the western tradition's argument about the nature of the meaning of life.

Grant: 196641 / AQ-50016-09,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Education Programs,   Year Awarded: 2009