This course invilces a survey of the various arts - visual, literary, musical - in relation to movements that define and shape the arts in distinctive form or style at various times and various epochs. In relation to this, the course will examine the possible ways in which these movements are generated by ideas - aesthetic, metaphysical, but also scientific, political and ethical - that come to dominate a specific period. Movements and styles, to be explained, include the Classical Greece, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, Florentine Renaissance, Roman Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Early Modernism, Abstract Expressionism and Postmodernism. In this way, students will begin to understand the creative arts as well as the ways in which the arts themselves help to form and transmit ideas. By exposing students to the ways in which ideas are central to the arts, students should be able to understand how the arts involve processes both of exploration and communication, so that the arts take their place rightfully at the center of the pursuit of rationality, and therefore at the center of what we call civilization.

A survey of major knowledge systems with an emphasis on the scientific and humanistic methods of inquiry.

Nature and methods of correct reasoning; deductive and inductive proof; logical fallacies.

A historical examination of theories and principles of social and personal conduct ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Nietzsche. Applications to current issues.

Study in specific topic in philosophy. May be taken for credit more than once when topic changes.