Facilitator: Professor Kristin Primus

Last Offered: Fall 2023

Some historians of philosophy like hewing very closely to texts; others love advancing more speculative reconstructions of arguments. Some historians of philosophy take themselves to be doing something closer to history, while others don't see much of a difference between what they're doing and what their colleague doing contemporary metaphysics is doing—they're just working with texts written at different times. Should philosophical texts from the past be treated like a historical object (as a historian might) or as a relevant voice to a contemporary conversation?

Facilitators: Dr. Chad Hegelmeyer and Professor Chiyuma Elliott

Last Offered: Fall 2023

co-sponsored by the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative

Old-School is a podcast that explores how African American writers negotiate their relationship to the classics of English literature and antiquity. Join the podcast co-hosts Chi Elliott and Chad Hegelmeyer for a follow-up conversations about Jupiter Hammon and Robert Hayden. We'll talk about these innovative poets, and explore different aspects of their classical influences by looking at additional poems not featured on the podcast.

Last Offered: Fall 2023

How might a religious belief, idea, concept implicitly shape one’s research and academic work? What are the implications or claims of said religious belief, idea, or concept on good intellectual work? And what resources do various religious traditions offer us in the present to help us become the kind of researcher, academic, or artist that we aspire to be?

Last Offered: Fall 2023

Laurus is a historical novel set in Russia at the end of the middle ages, but it plays with both the form of the novel and idea of the medieval past. While the novel is embedded in Russian literary, cultural and religious traditions, it also challenges the spiritual and cultural boundaries of modern nation-states. And as a creative project of the Russian medievalist, Eugene Vodolazkin, the novel explores the assumptions, questions, and epistemologies we bring to bear on history.

Facilitators: Five UC Berkeley Faculty

Last Offered: Spring 2023

What does my discipline, major, or department have to teach me about what makes a life meaningful, fulfilling or well-lived?

The Berkeley Institute invites undergraduate and graduate students to a semester-long conversation with UC Berkeley faculty on disciplinary knowledge and 'The Good Life.' Disciplines covered: Philosophy, Physical Sciences, Sociology and Ethnic Studies, English, and Psychology.

Facilitators: Professor Katie Peterson and Professor Young Suh

Last Offered: Spring 2023

Is the Good Life impossible to find if you’re an exile from your homeland? What does it mean to speak when the language you are speaking is not your own? By looking at Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictee, we will discuss writing as an act of speech deeply rooted in personal experience and the historical forces that surround it, and as a struggle to tell a story of inhabiting and surviving in one’s own body.

Last Offered: Spring 2023

co-sponsored by the African American Intellectual Studies Initiative

Since the Revolution, Americans have drawn on the Middle Ages to imagine the nation's place in world history, but these American "medievalisms" have often been considered the purview of white writers and thinkers. Less known or understood are the many ways that African Americans similarly repurposed the heritage of medieval Europe. How did Black Americans use that medieval past in their own literary and intellectual work? And what can the relationship between American history and the medieval period teach us about the study of history more generally?

Last Offered: Spring 2023

Is the good life free of illness, pain, and want? The result of technological and scientific progress? Is it even possible on planet Earth? Join us for screenings of three films throughout the spring semester that explore questions raised by our semester theme of “the good life.”

Films: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); The Great Beauty (2013); Capernaum (2018)

Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher

Last Offered: Spring 2023

Reading poetry doesn’t make us better people; it doesn’t necessarily reveal the secrets to living well; and it doesn’t even provide accurate information about the world. Sometimes it is enjoyable to read — but just as frequently it doesn’t bring pleasure, peace, or anything else. What is the use, then, of poetry in a life well-lived? We will first survey theories of literature as they relate to understandings of “the good life”— theories of how literature can and can’t make us more ethical, happier, smarter, or more personally fulfilled — and then examine some of these arguments in relation to poems in Tracy K. Smith's collection, Life on Mars.

Facilitator: Dr. Monica Mikhail

Last Offered: Spring 2023

What does it mean to live a good life if the condition of living becomes one of dying?

In this seminar, we will embark on a brief exploration of the anthropology of life and consider how attention to death sheds light on the contingencies of life differentially experienced. In the first session, we will examine the kinds of questions that emerge for anthropologists about the good life when investigating the limits of living in contexts where a good life does not seem possible here on this earth. In the second session, we will take a look at excerpts from a few ethnographies of peoples living in a disastrous present and consider how the intrusion of dying into living affects how we might conceive of the preconditions of living a good life.

Last Offered: Fall 2022

This reading group is for individuals who want to dive deeper into Blaise Pascal's Pensées, the Fall 2022 Community Read. We will discuss different thematic threads that emerge across the Pensées, ending on the question: How should we live our lives in the face of profound uncertainty, when committing ourselves to particular moral or philosophical positions feels impossible?

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last Offered: Fall 2022

What is ‘conscience’? When we appeal to conscience, what kind of commitment are we making to the individual over the authority of institutions – including the authority of the state or of a religious group? We will try to provide some pathways for navigating such claims and come to a deeper understanding of the relationship between conscience and faith.

Facilitator: Professor David Marno

Last Offered: Fall 2022

If calling in the sense of vocation implies that each of us is meant to perform a certain kind of labor that will make our life meaningful, the study of literature, that is, of meaning-making, should be eminently qualified to help us figure out what our calling is, whether we want to have one, or indeed whether we believe in the concept in the first place. Things get complicated, however, when the study of literature itself becomes a calling. Prof. Marno considers these complications via a brief history of the English department as it is refracted in John Williams’ 1965 campus novel, Stoner.

Facilitator: Elizabeth Kovats

Last Offered Fall 2022

In this seminar we seek to develop a foundational understanding of commitment. What does it mean, both as a concept and as a component of a life well lived? Why does it, often, induce fear? And, perhaps surprisingly, how does it foster belonging, agency and freedom? Would a commitment to something intangible, such as one's imagination, compel thinking/acting that is distinct from that of a commitment to a personal/social relationship? Join us as we discuss these questions, and those you share, as we develop a working definition of our focal topic.

Facilitator: Professor Katie Peterson and Professor Young Suh

Last Offered: Fall 2022

What does it mean to make a commitment to life as an artist? What does it share with other forms of commitment? Writer Katie Peterson and photographer Young Suh will investigate this question in conversation. Their discussion will touch on a range of topics in the life of the artist: the nature of craft and the purpose of a medium, the artist’s studio, the importance of routine, the reality of doubt and self-questioning, returning to your practice and principles in a time of crisis, and the vexed and necessary nature of ambition.

Last Offered: Spring 2022

A one-evening discussion of Rilke’s Letters, our Spring 2022 Community Read, alongside passages from philosophers, artists and theologians on solitude, community and creativity. What is the difference between loneliness and solitude? Is cultivating one’s inner life a narcissistic endeavor? Why do religious and philosophical traditions conceive of it instead as a return to community? And what kinds of creativity and insight are generated by solitude and community, respectively?

Last Offered: Spring 2022

What does it mean to feel at home in the world? What is the role of friendship in this? And what is the role of solitude? In his work on belonging, Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin shows that the healthy human self is not tightly bounded, but distributed amongst a network of friends. Drawing on classical philosophy, literature and contemporary science, Dr. Corbin argues that a contemporary epidemic of loneliness might be addressed by a greater understanding of the role of solitude in human relationships. Dr. Matthew Crawford (author of Shop Class as Soul Craft) will engage Dr. Corbin in conversation about why and how solitude might be an important antidote to consumerism, loneliness, polarization - and a way back to authentic friendship.

Facilitators: Professors Chiyuma Elliott and Katie Peterson

Last Offered: Spring 2022

co-sponsored by the African American Intellectual Traditions Initiative

A series of three weekend creative writing workshops open to students from UC Berkeley and local colleges. The series takes its title from Lucille Clifton’s poem “We Do Not Know Very Much About Lucille’s Inner Life.” Each workshop will take inspiration from African American poets who have used or rejected the classics of the Western intellectual tradition in interesting and generative ways—particularly the Bible. We will think with these poems, and learn how to catalyze new formal, technical, and conceptual experiments in our own creative writing.

Last Offered: Spring 2022

“Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life. […] but […] our religious traditions, communities, and public sphere are paying the price.”

Professor Chen's work challenges us to ask what the role of work is in our lives and how work shapes our spiritual development and our social commitments.

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last Offered: Spring 2022

Technology is something we make. But in turn it makes us; it shapes our lives. In our days, we have witnessed dramatic changes, an enormous growth in resources accessible through technology, but also great challenges – a reordering of our lives in view of these new technological paradigms. We will discuss, with the help of some very accessible texts and one documentary, the way in which technology is reconstructing the ways in which we relate to others, to the world, to ourselves, and God.

Guest: Dr. Zena Hitz

Last Offered: Fall 2021

Graduate students and faculty are invited to discuss the impediments to cultivating an intellectual life in the contemporary university. Do we have time for thought and study that isn’t purely for professional utility? How does one cultivate the inner life—both the intellect and the soul—with such demands? Is there a way to energize our professional tasks with the curiosity that led us into our fields in the first place—or can such curiosity only be found in leisure? We’ll think together about such questions, with the assumption that conversations like these are a good place to start.

Facilitator: Professor Karl Van Bibber and Elliot Rossomme

Last Offered: Fall 2021

In Lost In Thought, Zena Hitz explores some of the ways that learning can become a tool to be used in the pursuit of status, wealth, justice, or other social ends. Though Hitz writes from the perspective of the humanities broadly and philosophy specifically, the ideas she introduces touch on scientific work in both explicit and implicit ways. We will consider the ways that scientists face similar and dissimilar pressures to scholars in the humanities, together asking whether, why, and how these factors contribute to or detract from scientific pursuits and the work of the inner life.

Facilitator: Katie Peterson and Jesse Nathan

Last Offered: Fall 2021

Join us for a conversation between poets Jesse Nathan and Katie Peterson on poetry and the inner life. What is the "inner life," according to a poet? Can we talk about the "soul," and in what terms? Is poetry a way to get the inner life back? What does the "inner life" have to do with traditional religious faith practices, like prayer and worship? What can the idea of the inner life offer us during a time of social upheaval, climate crisis, and pandemic? Nathan and Peterson will pursue these questions in conversation, reading poems by other poets, and talking about their own work. A conversation with participants will follow.

Facilitator: Cassandra Sciortino

Last Offered: Fall 2021

What does it mean to make and protect a space for works of art and to spend time with them in contemplation without concern for any advantage or gain? How does the museum as a space of leisurely contemplation return us to our bodies, dignify us, and lead us to deeper connection with ourselves and with others?

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last offered: Fall 2021

If there is one indisputably universal feature of human existence, it is that we all suffer. Suffering and its causes are called “evil,” and we would like to know what it is and why it happens to us and our fellow creatures. Indeed, suffering seems to be exacerbated by our inability to understand its meaning. How can we make sense of the pain, suffering, and evil that surrounds us? What are their ultimate causes or reasons? Are they compatible with a good God? In this seminar, we will reflect on these questions with the help of some suggestive texts.

Facilitator: Professor Lara Buchak and Professor Steven Justice

Last Offered: Fall 2021

A lot of people think it should be hard to be a Christian and a college student. Is it? Should it be? And in any case, how can you do both well? Professors Lara Buchak and Steven Justice will offer both intellectual and practical perspectives on Christians’ relationships with ideas and arguments, with professors and peers, with churches and pastors, and with the choices they face in their own lives. No readings; just come ready to discuss. All undergraduates are welcome.

Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher

Last offered: Summer 2021

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is many things: a novel of ideas; an exploration of the nature of speech and action; a dark satire of American culture and its racial politics; and a profound meditation on the psychological and phenomenological experiences of race, bigotry and the Black experience in America. As the first novel by an African American writer to win the National Book Award, it is also a novel that is wary of the prestige of awards, that both affirms and is cautious of the institutionalization of American letters.

This reading group will work through Ellison’s long classic, considering the different contexts and philosophical questions each episode of the novel brings. But we will especially return to a question that Invisible man itself hesitates to answer: can fiction actually be a “raft of hope […] as we [try] to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal?”

Facilitator: Professor Karl Van Bibber and Elliot Rossomme

Last offered: Spring 2021

Science and religion may seem unlikely bedfellows, especially if popular narratives of a conflict between the two are to be believed. In this seminar, we will consider the relationship between various aspects of Christianity and modern science. While there are many ways to handle the (both real and perceived) tension between scientific and theological knowledge, we will take as our point of departure an assumption that contributions from both fields are intellectually valuable. From this lens, we will consider how relatively recent scientific developments such as evolutionary theory, quantum mechanics, and modern cosmology interact with classical Christian doctrines of creation, evil and suffering, divine and human agency, and the future of the cosmos. We will cover a new topic each meeting, basing the discussion on a short selection of readings.

Facilitator: Miguel Samano and Joseph Rodriguez

Last offered: Fall 2020

Charles Taylor is celebrated not only for the range of his interests–which include language, politics, science, and religion–but also for the accessibility of his writings. This reading group will meet to discuss some of his seminal essays on human nature, culture, and Christianity. Taylor’s work is widely read across the humanities and the sciences; no previous study of philosophy is required to learn from his work.

Facilitator: Cassandra Sciortino

Last offered: Fall 2020

Marian art is a central theme in the history of European painting. This seminar will look at the history of how Mary has been depicted in the painting of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and in more modern movements. It will discuss these paintings not only from the perspective of Christian theology and Marian devotion, but also from the point of view of the academic history of art.

Facilitator: Elliot Rossomme and Professor Karl Van Bibber

Last offered: Spring 2020

When Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions appeared in 1962, it offered a radically new perspective on the history of science. It challenged the prevailing view that science develops by “accumulation” and argued instead that the history of science is marked by revolutionary “paradigm shifts.” In this seminar we will read selections from Kuhn’s seminal book and related readings, meeting to discuss its implications for the practice of science and the evolution of scientific knowledge. The readings will develop a model for scientific revolutions from historical developments in the physical sciences, which are relevant to on-going revolutions within a variety of scientific disciplines, including geology, cosmology, genetics, and neuroscience. Together, we will examine the stages in the “life” of scientific ideas alongside a brief history of the scientists who shaped them. We will also discuss what, if anything, makes scientific inquiry distinct from other methods of knowing.

Facilitator: Professor Laura Buchak

Last offered: Spring 2020

Whether we are religious or secular, our lives are structured by rituals. Religious believers often participate in liturgies, but our culture is filled with other “liturgies” as well. This seminar will ask what a “ritual” is and what purposes ritual serves. We will examine this issue by looking at specific examples. What is the point of prayer, and what does one need to believe or do for it to be effective? Must a religious service take a specific form? Do spiritual practices need to be tied to a religion, or can secular analogues serve the same purpose? Students will be invited to discuss their own experiences about daily habits and “rituals” that form human character.

Facilitator: Professor Katie Peterson

Last offered: Fall 2019

Many are wondering if it is still possible to dream of an America where people of vastly different backgrounds can live and thrive together. This seminar proposes an actual beginning to the conversation by reading short excerpts from James Baldwin’s controversial 1963 book The Fire Next Time. Baldwin had deep misgivings about the possibility of racial reconciliation, and the role that religion played in American life. But Baldwin maintained that through a transformation of our common loves and shared hopes that “we can make American what America must become.”

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Spring 2019

In 1850, nearing the end of his writing career, Soren Kierkegaard published the book that he regarded as his most personal and his most important. Training in Christianity was his summation of “what it meant to be a Christian.” It culminated his ongoing feud with an established church that, he believed, had betrayed Christianity by aligning its teachings with the values and institutions of European culture. “Christendom has done away with Christianity, without being quite aware of it,” he charged. This group will meet to discuss Kierkegaard’s ideas about Christian life in a post-Christian culture, asking what relevance his ideas might have for students today. It will also consider his proposals for “introducing Christianity into Christendom.” Our short readings will include selections from his Attack on Christendom.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Summer 2019

Jane Austen’s novels are charged with moral significance, and offer guidance, both serious and hilarious, in the virtuous conduct of life. Her heroines learn about the importance of good character and the social virtues that perfect it. Sense and Sensibility tells the story of two sisters who learn these lessons (and others!) through the struggles with courtship and their search for marriage. We will meet to discuss the novel and to talk about the relationship between literature and ethics.

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last Offered: Fall 2020

St. Thomas Aquinas ranks among the most important thinkers in the history of Western civilization. His synthesis of Greek philosophy and medieval theology has influenced philosophers, artists, politicians, and churches for over half a millenium. This discussion group will introduce students to the basics of Aquinas’ thinking about ethics. It will focus on his understanding of human happiness and the moral virtues. Its goal is to help first-time readers to approach Aquinas’ writings with confidence, and to see the moral life as Aquinas did–as part of the journey of rational creatures to their final end and true happiness.

Last offered: Summer 2020

By early 1943, it was clear to many observers that the Allies would win the Second World War. But for C.S. Lewis, the conflict had revealed a civilizational crisis that military victory alone could not solve. He feared that the war had a exposed a terrifying ignorance about the foundations of a humane social order. He argued that to be worthy of victory, and to avoid a degradation worse than defeat, Western nations would need to understand the basis of humanistic education. This reading group will meet to discuss Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and its argument that only universal values, rooted in man’s rational nature, can protect human dignity.

Facilitator: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher & Dr. Chad Hegelmeyer

Last offered: Summer 2020

Three years before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison gave a series of lectures at Harvard examining depictions of race in American culture. She argued that the American imagination had been profoundly shaped by the categories of “whiteness” and “blackness,” and that knowledge of their codependency is essential for knowledge of American history. With Morrison as our guide, this discussion group will consider how American history and literature has shaped, and has been shaped by, an unconscious awareness of race.

Facilitator: Prof. Katie Peterson

Last offered: Fall 2018

Human life isn’t a safe space–and thankfully so. Bad feelings can lead to good thoughts, and losing one’s temper can be morally productive. This seminar will argue that human reactions like anger, hatred, envy, confusion, frustration, disgust, even guilt can help us attain self-knowledge. We’ll look at moments in literature and philosophy where “dangerous” emotions are seen as sources of real knowledge, including scenes from Homer’s Illiad, a few pages from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, a short essay by James Baldwin, and a few other readings. In our meetings we will talk together about how writers depict uncomfortable feelings and how “bad” feelings can be good and even praiseworthy. All the readings will be short and we’ll re-read them in the seminar together.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last Offered: Spring 2018

In the autumn of 1968, the world seemed on the verge of collapse. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the growing American entanglement in Vietnam, and the assasinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy left the entire Western world bitter and divided. From Berkeley to Paris, students revolted on university campuses. The same year a young German professor named Joseph Ratzinger published Introduction to Christianity, and fifty years later people are still talking about it. Ratzinger’s book was a set of university lectures written for students who, he believed, had become intellectually alienated from the basics of Christian thought. The book was his attempt to think theologically amid the revolutions occuring all around him, rather than to dismiss them. This discussion group will meet to talk about short selections from Ratzinger’s text. It presumes no previous study of theology, only a healthy curiosity about how Christians think.

Facilitator: Ravit Dotan

Last offered: Spring 2018

Some think that good science is, or should be, free from the influence of values. Drawing from contemporary philosophy of science, in this seminar we will explore questions like: what does it mean for science to be free from values? Can science be free from values? If science can’t be free from values, is it still objective, reliable, trustworthy, etc.? What roles should science have in society if it is not value free? We will discuss and evaluate arguments for the claim that scientific practices cannot be insulated from the influence of values, as well as examples from various scientific disciplines. Then, we will draw implications from the claim that science is not value free. We will consider what properties such a science might have (e.g., is it objective? Is it reliable?), and how the general public and policy makers should interact with it.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Spring 2018

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents, on both the left and right, sometimes forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. In his new book, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. In this reading group, we will examine Deneen’s argument that political liberalism is a system whose success is generating its own failure. We will also look at critical reviews of the book from a variety of perspectives.

Facilitator: Professor Lara Buchak

Last offered: Spring 2018

What does it mean to love? How is the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor different from loving one’s friends or partner? What does love require one to believe, do, and hope for? We will read selections from Kierkegaard’s “Works of Love,” and the discussions will emphasize practical wisdom, that is, how we should live our lives.

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last offered: Fall 2017

The contemporary age talks much about “virtual realities” and spends much time living in them. But perhaps some virtual realities are not an escape from reality, but a deeper entrance into it. This seminar will examine the art of painting as one way to enter more deeply into the nature of reality. Aristotle claimed that “art imitates nature.” But what does it mean for painting to imitate reality? And what does painting reveal to us about its nature? Having answers to these questions will provide insights not only into painting, but into many fundamental questions in philosophy as well. Other questions that this seminar will entertain: Whose views are we inhabiting when seeing a painting? Why do animals not paint? What can we learn from the history of painting? What is the difference between painting and photography?

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow

Last offered: Fall 2018

Artificial Intelligence promises much. According to some, it will not only rival human intelligence but surpass it entirely, bringing with it incalculable gains in knowledge, power, and wealth. According to others, it will lead to a loss of human dignity and to a decline in the quality of human lives. It is difficult to evaluate such claims from the perspective of both philosophy and science. This seminar will raise some of the most fundamental questions about the nature and promise of AI. What is AI and what is it not? How does AI compare to human intelligence? Can a robot be said to be conscious and make decisions? Can a robot be our “equal” and even the bearer of rights? What is the possible moral status of AI? Our seminar will explore these questions with the help of some short texts and the knowledge and expertise of all those present.

Facilitator: Professor Anselm Ramelow

Last offered: Spring 2018

It seems hardly possible to lead a meaningful life without assuming the freedom to choose and to pursue goals and purposes. Nevertheless, throughout history this assumption has been challenged, be it by Marxists, psychologists or, more recently, by neurophysiologists. Almost all of these challenges to free will are rooted in forms of materialism. Other challenges, however, are religious in nature (predestination). With the help of some key texts, which will be provided, we will see how free will is best understood, and what grounds we have for assuming its existence.

Facilitator: Prof. Katie Peterson

Last offered: Spring 2018

What do poetry and prayer have in common? In our contemporary world, poetry is often thought of as an art form of personal expression, or a meditation on personal identity. Prayer, on the other hand, describes the appeal a believer, or possible believer, might make to a deity larger than the self. The title of this seminar comes from Robert Frost’s definition of prayer: “Dear Lord – Pay attention – to me.” When we meet, we’ll try to figure out what poetry has to offer Christian thinking and practice, and, perhaps more radically, what Christian thinking and practice has to offer poetry. Our readings will come from “Christian” poems, and will also argue that there is such a thing – that art doesn’t have to be detached from faith, or, indeed, other Christian ideas, either in its composition or in its study.

Facilitator: Professor Lara Buchak

Last offered: Spring 2017

What place do assumptions that are distinctly religious have in the contemporary, secular academy? Often, when people are asking this question, they want to know whether there might be some conflict between being a committed adherent of a religion and the enterprise of seeking knowledge. But we want to ask a bigger question, and one that should be of special interest to Christians: is there something positive and distinct that religious views can offer the academy? In this seminar we will see how religious assumptions—about what the world is like and what we ought to do—make an important contribution to the university’s pursuit of knowledge.”

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last Offered: Fall 2017

How should we deal with people who hold views we find noxious, irrational, or dangerous? Should we aim to be non-judgmental or should we instead aim to correct, marginalize, or even shame them? This seminar will consider different ways of handling deep disagreement in both academic and public life. In the first part, we will critically examine two arguments in favor of limiting freedom of expression on campus. In the second part, we will ask how we might see the university as an institution where deep differences, including religious differences, can be engaged in civil argument and exchange.

Facilitator: Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last offered: Spring 2017

How might assuming the best help us understand the world? According to Gottfried Leibniz, the world is most rationally explained by assuming that all things are ordered with an eye towards what is good and even best. Things happen for a good reason—not only human actions, but events in the natural world as well. This seminar will introduce students to the metaphysics of Leibniz, a field of study that seeks to explain the ultimate nature of reality. We will read selections from his Discourse on Metaphysics and his Monadology. Our goal will be to see how Leibniz’s approach to the deepest questions of philosophy might help us better understand the nature of God, the world, and our place in it.

Facilitators: Dr. Matthew Rose & Professor Steven Justice

Last offered: Spring 2017

We often talk about identity to get at questions about being ourselves–who am I, what am I, and what makes me this person I am? But when we start to press these questions, we can find it hard to capture the most basic experiences of selfhood–the values, intuitions, hopes, and predicaments that shape our identities. This seminar will take up the problem of identity from a variety of religious perspectives. Its goal is to see how religious thought might offer conceptual resources that deepen and enlarge our ability to think clearly our own identities.

Facilitator: Professor Lara Buchak

Last offered: Fall 2016

This seminar will focus on questions surrounding the phenomenon of conversion, which is a radical shift in viewpoint. How can we ever come to occupy a perspective radically different from the one we currently hold? Does this happen as the result of a rational process, like considering arguments or collecting evidence, or as the result of a different kind of process, like being deeply moved by something or reading a novel? Can we understand a different perspective without believing it, or does conversion to a different viewpoint require committing to it ahead of time? If we know that there are different viewpoints–radically at odds with each other–that we can adopt, is there a good way to make a choice about which one to occupy?

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Fall 2016

Plato’s moral thought is foundational for Western culture. He attempted, controversially, to ground morality in human reason, rather than custom, superstition, or sentiment. This seminar will introduce some of Plato’s basic ethical arguments as they appear in his dialogue the Gorgias. The dialogue poses a disturbing challenge to its readers: learn what is truly good for you or live the life of a slave. Readings for this seminar are optional. Previous study of philosophy is not required.

Facilitator: Anselm Ramelow, OP

Last offered: Fall 2016

Architecture, together with music, is usually quoted as a counterexample to Aristotle’s thesis that “art imitates nature.” “Representational” theories of art seem to fail in explaining architecture. In this seminar we will find that, contrary to these objections, there are important ways in which architecture does imitate nature. We will have to ask what “nature” means and distinguish three fundamental meanings of the term, all of which are applicable to architecture.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Fall 2016

The relationship between our professional lives and moral identities is by all accounts conflicted. We are unsure how much personal fulfillment our work should provide. We are unsure whether our jobs ought to reflect our deepest commitments. Matters are made more difficult if we lack the ability to think clearly about the nature and character of work itself. How should we decide which vocation to pursue? How will that choice shape our understanding of time, place, and identity? How much money is enough? Are there hidden dangers to working in technology? This seminar is a continuation of the Institute’s reading group on After Virtue. While participation in both will be beneficial, it is by no means necessary. Short weekly readings will be drawn from sociology, literature, economics, history, and theology.

Facilitator: Professor Steven Justice

Last offered: Spring 2016

Dante’s Divine Comedy is certainly the greatest literary work Europe produced in the middle ages, maybe the greatest it has ever produced. Part of its greatness is its laying out for imagination what the will (will as both desire and choice) requires for its successful realization. It presents, you might say, an “art of willing.” These classes will introduce the Purgatorio, the second of the Comedy’s three parts, which narrates the journey through Purgatory. Though the instructor is a scholar of medieval literature, we will not look mainly at its medieval or its literary qualities; we will think through the discipline of wanting, choosing, and acting that it embodies.

Facilitator: Cassandra Sciortino & Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Spring 2016

Beauty is something most of us experience intensely but struggle to understand reflectively. We glimpse beauty all around us: in nature, art, the human body, and even in the rules of thought and number. But what can we say, if anything, about the character of beauty as such? In this seminar we will seek to understand beauty as the “splendor of form” and its properties of integrity, proportion, and simplicity. We will also discuss how beauty might guide us into a deeper knowledge of love, nature, and revelation.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Spring 2016

The question of what an education is for is the most important question any student can ask. Yet our universities, having lost confidence in their ability to answer the question, have largely removed it from formal study. The result is that the liberal arts now find themselves widely embattled, disdained, and ignored. This seminar will ask about the purpose and value of liberal education in the twenty-first century, as well as threats to it. Themes we will discuss include the importance of tradition, the function of critique, the cultivation of the intellect, and the relationship between the humanities and human freedom.

Last Offered: Spring 2016

How, as undergraduates, should we approach universities like UC Berkeley? What does it mean to be educated today? And what role might religious commitments play in the process? The Undergraduate Brunch Hour is a series of student-led discussions designed to foster the intellectual growth of undergraduates from all disciplines through informal but rigorous engagement with the principles and traditions sustaining academic inquiry. Students will have an opportunity to present readings of their choice and to discuss key ideas in philosophy, literature, history and the natural sciences. Breakfast will be provided each week, and some weeks will be spent at local art museums, concerts, or other cultural activities.

Facilitator: Mark McClay

Last offered: Fall 2015

What do we mean by “religion”? How do we distinguish the religious from the non-religious? What role(s) does religion play in the life of an individual? Of a group? Of a society or culture? This cross-disciplinary reading group will read and discuss a series of foundational texts in the theory of religion, ranging from Durkheim to Geertz.

Facilitator: Professor Steven Justice

Last offered: Fall 2015

Dante’s Divine Comedy is certainly the greatest literary work Europe produced in the middle ages, maybe the greatest it has ever produced. Part of its greatness is that it lays out for the imagination a vision of what the intellect requires for its successful operation. It presents, you might say, a challenging and practical “art of thinking.” This seminar introduces the last of the Comedy’s three parts, the journey through Heaven narrated in the Paradiso, primarily working through the discipline of thought it embodies rather than its medieval or literary qualities.

Facilitators: Professor Lara Buchak & Connor Grubaugh

Last offered: Fall 2015

This reading group works through Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a work which examines the historical roots of contemporary moral disagreement and offers an explanation for the breakdown of moral consensus and traditional ethics in Western cultures. Discussions will touch on the book’s major themes: the incoherence of modern moral debate, the emotional basis of contemporary moral attitudes, and the place of the virtues in the restoration of civil discourse. No background in moral philosophy is required. Copies of the book will be provided.

Facilitator: Professor Steven Justice

Last offered: Fall 2016

An intensive, monthly discussion of intellectual principles and the intellectual life that help students develop a kit of tools to use in approaching their courses, their reading and interests, the ideas they like and the ideas they don’t. Discussion topics will build on the interests and questions that students bring to the Colloquium: questions about the use of intellectual inquiry, about the coherence and purpose of their education—nearly anything related to the life of the mind.

Facilitator: Professor Lara Buchak and Professor Karl van Bibber

Last offered: Spring 2015

Is there a rational method for forming and changing beliefs about God as we navigate the world? In Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning, Nancey Murphy argues that theology operates just like science: It involves forming a research program, gathering data, and testing hypotheses. She points to historical and contemporary examples of Christian thought, including Jonathan Edwards’s criteria for judging whether a religious experience is genuine and Ignatius’s rules for discerning what direction to take in one’s life. We will read and evaluate her book, paying particular attention to how science and theology actually make progress, and to what extent they are similar.

Facilitator: Cassandra Sciortino

Last offered: Spring 2015

This seminar explores the early modern to modern period in the history of European art and traces how the visual operations of an art object respond to devotional, ethical, and aesthetic currents in the culture in which it was conceived. Special attention will be paid to the question of how images are invested with the power to transform the beholder’s consciousness and the role of aesthetic experience in enabling this encounter.

Facilitators: Monica Mikhail & Connor Grubaugh

Last offered: Fall 2014

This seminar offers a survey of social and political justice in early Christian history, beginning with the significance of social justice to the early church as expressed by St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom and concluding with an exploration of Christian understandings of justice in the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea, St. Ambrose of Milan, and St. Augustine.

Facilitator: Professor Lara Buchak

Last offered: Fall 2014

What is the role of reason and emotion in forming religious beliefs? Does belief require an emotional response or is it more appropriate to rely on a purely rational approach? This workshop examines four different views that engage these and other questions about belief by reading short passages from a representative thinker. We will discuss the merit of each view as an account of why people actually believe, and we will discuss what each view implies about whether and when religious beliefs are justified.

Facilitators: Professor Karl van Bibber & Nuri Kim

Last offered: Fall 2014

This reading group focuses on the ethical code embedded in the culture and conventions of science research. The group will read “On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research” and meet weekly for conversations on mentoring, sharing results, human or animal testing, conflicts of interest, and responding to violations of professional standards. Designed for students with experience in science research, this seminar presumes no prior study of ethics and endeavors, instead, to make explicit the sometimes implicit aspects of ethical scientific conduct.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Fall 2014

This seminar offers an introduction to Aristotle’s Ethics, a foundational text in western and near eastern thought on the nature of true and false happiness. Aristotle argues that to be happy one must be good, and that to be good one must know what human life is for. But what is a human being? And what is the difference between a good and bad human life?

Facilitators: Professor Lara Buchak

Last offered: Spring 2014

If we take current science seriously, what room if any is left for religion? This workshop will look at the assumptions behind doing science and those behind practicing religion, and examine whether these conflict. We will also address more specific questions about the findings of science and what light they shed on religious questions.

Facilitator: Dr. Matthew Rose

Last offered: Spring 2014

Does secularism simply describe the absence or withdrawal of religious faith from public life? Or does it possess its own values and aspirations? The goal of this seminar will be to better understand how and why many people think of themselves as secular through readings and discussions of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Facilitator: Charity Ketz

Last offered: Spring 2014

This workshop will provide a forum for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, visiting scholars, and professors to discuss portions of their written work in progress. Such groups are most generative when participants become familiar with each other’s disciplinary methods, project aims, and writing styles and when the writing submitted to the workshop is still in draft form. Hence we ask members to commit for at least one semester and we encourage everyone to submit early versions of their chapter, essay, or article drafts.

Facilitators: Professor Karl van Bibber & Nuri Kim

Last offered: Fall 2013

This seminar is an introduction to the philosophy of science through Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We’ll meet weekly to discuss to the implications of Kuhn’s theory on the practice and evolution of scientific knowledge. The readings will be supplemented with lectures by scientists from diverse fields.

Facilitators: Monica Mikhail & Bola Malek

Last offered: Fall 2013

This half-semester seminar offers a survey of the works of the apostles and theologians on the formation of the early Christian community and the principles by which it expressed its unity and mission. Through careful examination of select readings from the New Testament and various early Christian thinkers, it aims to discover the meanings of the term “church” and how the church defined itself through its sacramental practices.