Knox College Moodle

American political life is in a state of dysfunction and decay. Governing institutions seem unable to meet the demands of the modern world, and our common life is marked by fragmentation and hyperpolarization. The polity is sick, even dying, a diagnosis indicated by any number of opinion polls measuring widespread and growing distrust in governing institutions and among fellow citizens. A central part of the problem is that citizens and politicians have lost the ability to talk intelligently about the fundamental features of American political life. This course addresses this political and educational pathology by introducing students to difficult problems of constitutional interpretation. Students are invited to adopt the perspective of one responsible for designing or maintaining a polity. To do this, we will attempt to consider and inhabit multiple constitutional or regime-level perspectives, namely the perspective of a founder or constitutional framer, the perspective of a foreigner or outside observer, and the perspectives and concomitant critiques of those ostensibly included within the political community while being simultaneously denied the guarantees and privileges of full citizenship. Each of these vantage points offers insights that complicate, nuance, and deepen our understanding of the fundamental identity of the American regime. From these multiple vantage points we will consider such questions as: How democratic is the American Constitution? Is democracy only an aspiration, or is democracy also something that happens to us? Must a democratic constitution be capitalistic too? Does capitalism have limits or pose any threat to constitutional governance? How does the Constitution secure rights? What kind of person or citizen is created by our polity? Who is included and who is excluded from the political community? Does the constitutional order provide an adequate moral framework for political life? What is a constitution?

Through a close reading of core texts of the American political tradition, we will attempt to answer these and other similar questions. Our main texts will be primary sources that we will close-read together. We will also read several essays that synthesize and interpret these sources.

In this course, students will

• Take a synoptic view of the American regime from different vantage points
• Consider and evaluate competing founding perspectives on the merits of the Constitution and the kind of political life it would create and sustain across time
• Close-read and interpret primary sources in the American political tradition
• Write analytical essays that require the re-articulation and assessment of the arguments and ideas from core texts of the American political tradition
• Form judgements about the advantages and disadvantages of the American political tradition

Course Catalog Description

This course examines the neural basis for cognition beginning with attention and spans the breadth of cognitive processes to include memory, learning, language, reasoning, and problem solving. Students learn how our minds absorb, store, and manipulate information from the world to solve problems, make decisions, comprehend language, produce art, and laugh at jokes. Students are encouraged to think critically and develop questions about their own cognitive processes.

First-Year Preceptorial is your gateway to a liberal arts education. This course will ask questions of you, find you exploring possibilities, considering responses, seeking alternative solutions. This course will also ask you to consider how more than one ‘answer’ might be possible, how complexity is one of the traits that defines humanity, our being human—far more than right and wrong, a or b, true or false. By engaging in close-reading, by participating in a classroom community of respect and consideration, and by allowing voices of those both like and unlike us to be heard, together we’ll work together to explore often difficult (but interesting) questions.

The specific focus of this course is ‘Creating Monsters.’ What is a “monster”? How does a “monster” come to be? What can a “monster” tell us about the society in which it exists? Through a variety of literary texts and films, we will analyze the “monster” as a socially constructed concept reflecting the anxieties, fears, and assumptions of a society. In this light, the monster is often not an entity that threatens us from the beyond, but something conceptualized and created within our own minds. We will therefore consider how the rhetoric of monstrosity can be applied to humans, especially marginalized groups, and ask what purpose inflicting “monstrous” language upon others has. We will draw a little from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and cognitive and social psychology in evaluating and examining the factors involved in the creation and interpretation of monsters. Ultimately, we will consider in detail whether the study of monsters is in fact a study of ourselves and what it means to be human.

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Course Catalog Description

In this course, we will examine relations between the concepts of life and death by surveying a variety of ancient and modern philosophical accounts of them.  We begin the course by exploring ancient philosophical practices designed to cultivate ways of thinking about death.  We will be especially interested in how these specific practices of thinking about death helped determine various philosophical ways of life, distinct cultivated forms of thinking and acting.  In doing so, we follow Pierre Hadot’s account of ancient philosophical practices in What Is Ancient Philosophy? and look at selected texts by Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, among others.  In the second half of the course, reading texts by Michel Foucault, Philippa Foot, Georg Simmel, and Michael Thompson, we investigate contemporary philosophical problems surrounding the concept of life.  Here we will take a number of approaches: we will mark out certain historical questions about the cultivation of forms of life; we will discuss euthanasia; we will compare life to adventure.  Finally, we will look at the treatment of forms of life, relations between ways of speaking and ways of doing, in particular the role of picturing in our understanding of speaking and doing, and death in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

This course will review models, etiology, assessment, and intervention for various developmental and acquired disabilities. This course is organized through a lifespan developmental approach beginning with etiology diagnosis and moving through early intervention, special education, dating and sexuality, vocation, community involvement, and healthcare. Specific disabilities will be examined through a biopsychosocial lens. Autism spectrum disorder, AD/HD, intellectual disability, learning disabilities, traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, acquired blindness, and related conditions will be covered.

The transformation of sound into digital data has profoundly affected the creation, production and distribution of music. With the vast majority of music now mediated by some form of digitization, it has shaped even our most basic modes of listening. This course grapples with the implications of this technology, its history, and its broad range of uses and tools. In doing so, students will utilize the Knox Electronic Music Studio to explore the foundational techniques of audio production, synthesis, sampling, podcasting, film scoring, and interactive software development.

This course continues the themes and content from Digital Audio Production I, where students explored society’s digital reality through the creative, productive, and distributive processes of sound and music. As such, this course advances students’ technical knowledge by diving deeper into digital audio production through modular synthesis, advanced mixing projects, creative use of analog technologies blended with digital audio, computer music programming, as well as the theory and techniques of sound synthesis. In doing so, students will explore interactive and reactive creativity by deploying new and old technologies in unusual or critically relevant ways for musical composition.

This course will introduce the three major philosophical systems of East Asian thought: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism through their canonical texts. This historical approach will be supplemented by contemporary readings in each tradition. When taught as a component of the Japan Term, this course will pay special attention to the development of Japanese Buddhism, specifically Pure Land Buddhism (Amida Buddhism), Esoteric Buddhism (Shingon Buddhism) and Zen Buddhism (Soto and Rinzai).

Introduction to ancient Greek language.

Ethics is centrally concerned with questions regarding relations with oneself and with others and, more generally, our ways of life together.  In this course we will examine competing accounts of the self’s relation to itself and to others from the history of philosophy. What sorts of relations to self and others do these accounts call for?  We will concern ourselves especially with the various roles played by justice, pleasure, utility, and the good in these philosophical accounts.  We will devote ourselves to close readings of texts by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Philippa Foot, Charles Mills, Cora Diamond, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.

In this course, we examine some of the ethical challenges presented by business and describe a particular form of business practice, central to our thinking about ethics and business, one that we can generally identify as accounting. In doing so, we will first look at several theorists concerned to describe the structure of business, including the relations between labor and capital. What relations do we have to capital? What relations do we have to each other through exchange? Why do these relations call for accounting? Next, we will turn our attention to a number of texts from the history of ethics in order to trace different ways of thinking about relations of the self to self and others. In addition, we will examine the ways in which these ethical views differ as ways of accounting for one’s self and one’s productive activities. Finally, we will turn to a number of case studies from the history of business in order to explore the importance of various forms of accounting. Why are such accountings necessary? To whom are we accountable and why?

Ethics is centrally concerned with questions regarding relations with oneself and with others and, more generally, our ways of life together.  In this course we will examine competing accounts of the self’s relation to itself and to others from the history of philosophy. What sorts of relations to self and others do these accounts call for?  We will concern ourselves especially with the various roles played by justice, pleasure, utility, and the good in these philosophical accounts.  We will devote ourselves to close readings of texts by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Philippa Foot, Charles Mills, Cora Diamond, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. 

A comprehensive analysis of fairy tales as historical relics and dynamic cross-cultural products. To understand the distinctive nature of the fairy tale as both uniquely regional and (for the most part) universally recognizable, we’ll start with a question: What do we mean when we call something “a fairy tale”? (Also, what is the difference between a folk tale and a literary fairy tale?  Who wrote the Arabian Nights?  What about Grimm’s Fairy Tales?  Which came first, Yeh-hsien or Cinderella? Why do we remember the gingerbread house from Hansel and Gretel but not the duck?)  An additional consideration of fairy tale aesthetics, tropes, motifs, figures and structural classifications or tale types will guide our inquiry into the fairy tale form.  Finally, in order to understand the fairy tale as a narrative underpinning or intertext for more complex forms of storytelling, we’ll first study the “classic” fairy tales (from Little Red Riding Hood to Blue Beard) and their variations, before turning our attention to the application of fairy tale elements in film and literature. 

Michel Foucault’s work analyzes the functioning of power as a field of relations within a set of social practices involving, characteristically, sexuality, policing, punishment, race, and mental illness, among other things.  He is particularly interested to describe the development of these practices in order to make clear how their domains were created as the subjects of scientific discourse and in terms of which truth claims could be made.  In this course, we track the development of Foucault’s theorizing the power relations that structure social practices and the truth claims that can be made about their domains.  We end by considering Foucault’s late turn to ethics and the philosophical practices of the ancient world in light of his interest in the complex relations between power and truth.

Gangster movies explore fantasies and anxieties shared by audiences increasingly required to imagine themselves in a world of unceasing competition between individuals. In this course, we look closely at Hollywood gangster movies from the 20th century in order to describe transformations in the shared terms and mechanisms through which individuals make practical decisions about their lives. We pay particular attention to the gangster movies of the 1970s and 1980s as studies in self-deception and rationalization. We approach the movies as philosophical texts and make sense of them in connection with written texts by Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others.

In recent years, profound changes in the global economy, climate change, and transnational politics have culminated in large movements of people in almost every region. This course examines how people experience displacement, migration, and statelessness; how home, community and belonging are reconstituted both in exile and through the making of diaspora communities. We will also pursue related questions about how international laws, national policies, and practices of social exclusion or inclusion influence the broader context of migration. How do population movements affect politics at the international, regional, and local levels – and vice versa? In what ways are relations of kinship, family, and gender being reformulated in response to transnational movements? Reading materials will include ethnographic studies of migrant and diaspora communities, policy reports on the international refugee regime, literary works produced by migrant authors, and a sampling of mainstream media reporting on immigration in the US and around the globe.

This course will introduce you to the language of form, design, and visual communication. The grammar of any language is a set of guidelines that allows one to build complex representations out of simple elements, thus communicating a given idea to those who encounter that representation. The language of vision is no less influential than that of the spoken or written word, yet we are often far less aware of its effect in our lives. 

Rome grew from a third-rate market town on the Tiber River to the center of a Mediterranean-spanning empire. How did this happen? And why should we care? This class seeks to answer these questions and others as we examine the political history of the ancient city, its institutions, and cultural achievements.

Course image credit: Photo by Hank Paul on Unsplash

Course Catalog Description

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This course provides an introduction to the art, visual culture, and architecture of colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America. The first half of the course will examine early contact between Europeans and Indigenous Americans, with an overview of the importation, adaptation, and responses of European artistic models in the Americas. We will analyze the transformation of Indigenous artistic traditions as a result of the European colonial project in the Americas (1492-ca–1820) through a variety of materials and topics, including, religious architecture, painting, prints, sculpture, and manuscripts drawings. The second half of the course will examine art from the early nineteenth century to the present, considering the role of the arts in building independent nations and creating shared artistic legacies constantly adapting and/or responding to outside influences. By analyzing current art historical debates, in the field of Latin American art, between national vs. cosmopolitan aesthetics, Hemispheric and Inter-American projects for continental unity we will see how Latin American artists negotiated issues of identity and contributed to the development of modern and contemporary art. We will explore twentieth-century Latin American visual arts through photography, manifestos, magazines, performances, exhibitions, and ephemera with a special focus on new technologies and global changes.

Course Catalog Description

Course Catalog Description

Course Catalog Description

Course Catalog Description

It is common to think of human perception as essentially causal in nature, to think of perception as something that happens when the world impinges on us, causing us to react to it.  This view mistakes perception as passively reactive to the causal powers of the world around us and misunderstands the role perception can play in our practical reasoning.  An instance of perception can function as a reason for action and not merely play a causal role in a chain of events; for example, if I see that you are upset and comfort you, my perception of your sadness functions as a reason for comforting you.  In this course, we will examine perception’s capacity to function as a reason for acting and not merely as a one more link in a causal chain.  The course is structured around the wager that the key to understanding perception’s capacity to be a reason for acting is the role that memory plays in shaping our capacities for perception.  We will trace competing accounts of relations between memory and perception from the history of philosophy, paying particular attention to modern and contemporary accounts of memory and perception, and focusing especially on the work on Henri Bergson.  The course opens and closes with careful attention to Bergson’s Matter and Memory; this attention is attenuated and sustained by examining accounts of memory from Elizabeth Anscombe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, and Stanley Cavell.  We will also watch movies by Orson Welles, Chris Marker, and others.

Music Research Methods is an introduction to the disciplines, methodologies, history and discourses of the study of Western art music. The practices of academic writing and thinking play a large role in the assignments and activities in this course, which culminate in a research proposal and bibliography developed from an initial research question.

Kant’s work marks a decisive turn for modern thinking. In this course, we trace different ways of responding to two basic Kantian insights: that freedom depends on acknowledging our ability to give ourselves laws and that contemporary reality is best analyzed in terms of forms of experience and the conditions that make particular forms of experience possible. We trace these responses in the works of Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, DuBois, Emerson, Nietzsche, and others. Our emphasis in reading these texts is on identifying ways in which these thinkers offer tools for helping us to better understand contemporary forms of experience.

If you're a Knox student hoping to pursue a career in medicine (MD or DO), MD/PhD, nursing, pharmacy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, veterinary therapy, dentistry, or public health, check out the resources within this classroom. Videos, powerpoint slides, workshop sessions, website links, resources to explore and learn how to get opportunities, and more!