SEM 100: First Year Seminar I

Number of Sections: 4 | Day and Time: Section A-Tuesday & Thursday (7:30-9:00 AM ICT), Section B-Monday & Wednesday (9:15-10:45 AM ICT), Section C-Monday & Wednesday (3:15-4:45 PM ICT), Section D-Tuesday & Thursday (3:15-4:45 PM ICT)

Course Description

The four-sequenced seminar courses are part of a one mega-course (16 credits), that share the same objectives and learning outcomes. 

In Freshman Seminar I, students will take a cross-cultural perspective on human existence in the context of the many worlds we all occupy: natural, social and existential.

Human beings, the philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote, is "being-in-the-world." In this course, students will experience and explore a wide variety of ways in which we can conceptualize what it means to be situated in the world. Students will explore human existence in the context of post-Darwinian understandings of what it means to be a human animal. Building on this foundation, they will consider what it means to be radically and irreducibly social. Through exploring the work of both Confucian philosophers and evolutionary theories of ethics, they will ask what it means to be a social animal. And they will explore the rich traditions of existentialism to explore what it means to find ourselves here, evolved beings living in society with each other, conscious of our limitations, our freedom and our death.

This Seminar I course will give students the ability to move between radically different frameworks of understanding, to derive rich and complex insights into the human experience.

(Course Type: Required AA Course)