SEM 101: First year Seminar II

Number of Sections: 4 | Days and Times: Section A-Monday & Thursday (9:15-10:45 AM ICT), Section B-Monday & Thursday (11:00 AM-12:30 PM ICT), Section C-Tuesday & Thursday (5:00-6:30 PM ICT), Section D-Tuesday & Thursday (7:30-9:00 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 II, students will explore questions about human knowledge and understanding. This seminar course will build on Freshman Seminar I, to ask challenging questions about our knowledge of ourselves, each other and the world we inhabit. It will equip students to engage more deeply with questions of knowledge, its uses and its misuses. And it will develop student’s critical awareness of different ways of approaching the question of what it means to know. The seminar will begin by looking at what knowledge is. It will draw on theories of knowledge from global philosophical traditions, from the theories of knowledge explored in Plato’s Theaetetus to the skillknowledge of Zhuangzi. Students will build on this to look at the practice of science, and its cultural role as a privileged form of knowledge. Students will study texts that not only ask about how science works, but how we imagine and reimagine the practice of science. Finally, students will ask the question "who gets to know?". They will explore challenging ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, in relation to the gendered and colonial/postcolonial contexts of human ways of knowing.