Courses

CHSS 31000 - Good Hands: Research Ethics
Instructor: Laurie Zoloth
Description: Basic research is intended to explore and evaluate truth claims at the edge of our understanding of the natural and physical world, and it is this very quality that renders it useful as science. Yet, this often creates significant ethical questions for the research as well as for the social order in which all research takes place. Often, courses in research ethics focus on the establishment and enforcement of canonical rules of behavior, where the goal is to inform the investigator about how to follow these established rules. This course will turn to a different set of problems in research ethics. While we will begin with a foundation in the history of research ethics, reviewing the key cases that shaped the policies about which we have consensus, (human and animal subject protections; authorship, etc.) will consider the problems about which there is not yet a clear ethical course: what are the limits of human mastery? Why is research deception so prevalent? Are there experiments which are impermissible and why? What is the obligation of the researcher toward their community? How can we think clearly and ethically in situations of deep uncertainty? We will consider how moral philosophy as well as theological arguments have shaped research science and reflect on the nature, goal and meaning of basic and translational research in modernity.

CHSS 32820 - Reading Darwin's Origin of Species
Instructor: Robert J. Richards
Description: In this course, we will read carefully each chapter of Darwin’s Origin and discuss it in detail—especially the logic and rhetoric of his arguments and special features. Each student will takes us through a chapter of the 1st edition, noting any changes introduced in subsequent editions, and, then, a general discussion will ensue guided by the instructor.

CHSS 33500 - Introduction to Logic
Instructor: Virgina Schultheis
Description: An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.

CHSS 34921 - Darwinism and Literature
Instructor: Dario Maestripieri
Description: In this course we will explore the notion that literary fiction can contribute to the generation of new knowledge of the human mind, human behavior, and human societies. Some novelists in the late 19th and early 20th century provided fictional portrayals of human nature that were grounded into Darwinian theory. These novelists operated within the conceptual framework of the complementarity of science and literature advanced by Goethe and the other romantics. At a time when novels became highly introspective and psychological, these writers used their literary craftsmanship to explore and illustrate universals aspects of human nature. In this course we read the work of several novelists such as George Eliot, HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Yuvgeny Zamyatin, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Italo Svevo, and Elias Canetti, and discuss how these authors anticipated the discoveries made decades later by cognitive, social, and evolutionary psychology.

CHSS 37901 - Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Instructor: Thomas Pendlebury
Description: This will be a careful reading of what is widely regarded as the greatest work of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Our principal aims will be to understand the problems Kant seeks to address and the significance of his famous doctrine of "transcendental idealism". Topics will include: the role of mind in the constitution of experience; the nature of space and time; the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of objects; how causal claims can be justified by experience; whether free will is possible; the relation between appearance and reality; the possibility of metaphysics.

CHSS 41920 - The Evolution of Language
Instructor: Salikoko Mufwene
Description: This course is designed to review critically some of the literature on the phylogenetic emergence of Language, in order to determine which questions have been central to the subject matter, which ones have recurred the most, and to what extent the answers to these are now better informed. The class will also review new questions such as the following: What is the probable time of the emergence of modern language(s)? Should we speak of the emergence of Language or of languages, in the plural?

CHSS 43204 - Climate Change, History and Social Theory
Instructors: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson & Neil Brenner
Description: This course considers some of the major approaches to climate change, history and social theory that have been elaborated in contemporary scholarship. The course is framed with reference to the analysis of major socioenvironmental transformations at planetary, regional and local scales during the last four centuries of global capitalist development, through historical case studies from major world regions and imperial configurations and their present-day legacies. Key topics include the environmental subtexts/contexts of classical and contemporary social theory and historiography; the histories and geographies of environmental crises under capitalism; the conceptualization of “nature” and the “non-human” in relation to societal (and industrial) dynamics; the role of capitalism and fossil capital in the production of “metabolic rifts”; the impact of earth system science on history and social theory, including in relation to questions of periodization and associated debates on the “Anthropocene,” the “Capitalocene” and the “Plantationocene”; the interplay between urbanization, rural dispossession and climate emergencies; the uneven sociopolitical geographies of risk, vulnerability and disaster; the (geo)politics of decarbonization; insurgent struggles for climate justice; and possible post-carbon futures.

CHSS 30506 - Cities, Space, Power: Introduction to urban social science
Instructor: Neil Brenner
Description: This lecture course provides a broad, multidisciplinary introduction to the study of urbanization in the social sciences. The course surveys a broad range of research traditions from across the social sciences, as well as the work of urban planners, architects, and environmental scientists. Topics include: theoretical conceptualizations of the city and urbanization; methods of urban studies; the politics of urban knowledges; the historical geographies of capitalist urbanization; political strategies to shape and reshape the built and unbuilt environment; cities and planetary ecological transformation; post-1970s patterns and pathways of urban restructuring; and struggles for the right to the city.

CHSS 30574 - How to Think Sociologically
Instructor: Marco Garrido
Description: This course tackles the “big problem” of low sociological literacy. When faced with the problems of the world, people usually resort to economic, biological, or ideological explanations. They cite self-interest, genetically encoded drives, or some pre-given understanding of how the world works. The price of such simple frameworks is an impoverished view of the world, a lack of understanding and empathy, and a predisposition to orthodoxy or ideology. In this sense, low sociological literacy is a big problem in the world today. This course was developed in the belief that the capacity to think sociologically—that is, to understand people as socially embedded, or shaped by the situations in which they find themselves—can enrich our understanding of the world immeasurably. It can give us analytical purchase on a number of social problems, including poverty; social inequality; racial, class, and gender discrimination; urban segregation; populism and political polarization; and organizational wrongdoing (we’ll discuss each of these topics in class). A sociological perspective can also transform how we engage with the world, promoting an ethics of understanding and empathy--as opposed to the ethics apparently prevalent today: judging people and insisting they change.

CHSS 31812 – East Asian Science and Technology: Ways of Knowing
Instructor: Yuting Dong
Description: This course is the first half of the East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine series. The second part of the course will be offered in the spring quarter by Professor Jacob Eyferth. In this series, we will read major works on the history of STM in East Asia and constantly are in conversation with studies of this history in the globe.

CHSS 32000 - Colloquium: Introduction to Science Studies
Instructor: Michael Rossi
Description: This course explores the interdisciplinary study of science as an enterprise. During the twentieth century, sociologists, historians, philosophers, and anthropologists all raised interesting and consequential questions about the sciences. Taken together their various approaches came to constitute a field, "science studies." The course provides an introduction to this field. Students will not only investigate how the field coalesced and why, but will also apply science-studies perspectives in a fieldwork project focused on a science or science-policy setting. Among the topics we may examine are the sociology of scientific knowledge and its applications, actor-network theories of science, constructivism and the history of science, images of normal and revolutionary science, accounts of research in the commercial university, and the examined links between science and policy.

CHSS 34215 – The History of the Book in East Asia: From Bamboo to Webtoon
Instructor: Graeme Reynolds
Description: This seminar offers an overview of the development and history of the “book” and its physical forms, broadly conceived, in East Asia from ancient times to the present. Drawing on recent scholarship, selected primary sources, and rare books housed within the library system, this course familiarizes students with the evolution of the book and methods of book production in China, Korea, and Japan, the principles and practices of material bibliography and the application of such to physical and digital objects, and selected topics salient to the social and cultural meanings of books: authorship, the book trade, reading, censorship, and more. Assignments include a short paper, a short presentation, and a longer final paper. All readings in English, but knowledge of East Asian history or languages helpful.

CHSS 36815 - History of Science and Technology in South Asia
Instructor: Prashant Kumar
Description: This course is an introduction to a growing literature on the production of scientific knowledge in and about South Asia. Moving away from an earlier historiography, which treated science as a black-boxed, essentially European kind of knowledge that was diffused to the rest of the world, we will pay special attention to the role indigenous and vernacular forms of knowledge played in making modern science. We will range from the early modern period to the contemporary, and deal with a range of topics such as agriculture, industry, communications, biomedicine, water, religion, and capitalism.

CHSS 38309 – Natural Science in Aristotle and His Predecessors
Instructor: Daniel Kranzelbinder
Description: ‘Unlike art, science destroys its past,’ is how Thomas Kuhn (1969) once partly distinguished the sciences from the arts. The scientific heroes of old get removed by progress and new breakthroughs. In this class, we examine Aristotle’s relationship to his predecessors in the first book of his foundational treatise on natural science, the Physics. We ask how Aristotle takes himself to make progress over his predecessors and how the answer to that question shapes our understanding of Aristotle’s project in ‘physics.’ To answer these questions, we will develop a rich and complex understanding of Aristotle’s conception of natural scientific inquiry and of the epistemological and methodological assumptions that drive his engagement with his predecessors. In doing so, we will be taking a critical look at the long-standing assumption by readers of Aristotle that his engagement with his predecessors in Physics I uniformly belongs to the dialectical stage of inquiry.

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CHSS 30930 - Risk and Rationality in an Uncertain World
Instructor: Lorraine Daston
Description: Our world is uncertain, but we must act in the present and plan for the future: this challenge is at the root of many modern theories of rationality. When is it rational to take risks, how many, and what kind? This course examines the history of thinking about such problems in philosophy, mathematics, economics, and psychology as well as the practices of gambling, insurance, commodities futures, disposal of nuclear waste, and long-term planning (for example, in the context of climate change). This course will meet two times per week for 3 hours, during the 1st five weeks of the quarter, March 24 - April 23.

CHSS 33820 - Reading William James’s Principles of Psychology
Instructor: Robert J. Richards
Description: In this course we will read carefully the chapters of the Principles and discuss the various features of each chapter, especially the logic and rhetoric of James’s arguments.

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