Why do I exist? What sort of creature am I? What sort of place is this world I see? How should I conduct my life? How should I deal with other people? Why do bad things happen? Can I really know anything? What things are worth knowing?

Questions such as these are the natural starting point of a person's education. Many of them are not finally answerable in themselves, but they often lead on to other, better defined, more manageable questions, and thus they are the seeds out of which all the various disciplines of modern thought have grown.

Freshman Studies is, in a sense, a course about such questions -- the large and fundamental questions which thoughtful people in every time and place have asked -- and the refinement of those questions into the various fields of research we call the liberal arts. The readings represent, in part, a sampling of some historically important attempts to answer the larger questions and the smaller questions that follow from them. Many of them are significant milestones in the fields of philosophy, literature, social theory, science, and the fine arts. Other, more recent works carry on the questioning in a variety of ways. In either case, whether we judge any of the particular answers they offer to be right or wrong, these works have shaped many of the ways we think about the world and act in it.

Which is not to say, however, that Freshman Studies is a course that seeks to resolve the enigmas of human existence. On any one of the larger questions, as well as many of the smaller ones, you will find that the writers and artists you will study are often in fundamental disagreement with each other. The history of thought is a history of disputes. But it is important, to begin with, to see that the existence of questioning itself is the primary mode of human discovery and that only good questions can begin to suggest good answers. As Socrates pointed out, knowledge is never achieved unless you start by confessing that you know nothing. The habit of formulating good questions and the rigorous testing of all reasonable answers are the qualities of mind Freshman Studies seeks to develop.

In summary, then, Freshman Studies will introduce you to some of the various methods people have used to seek answers to their fundamental questions and to those skills of reading, writing, speaking, and clear thinking that one needs to frame good questions and begin, at least, to find the best and most usable answers.

The Texts

Although there are some significant differences between the Freshman Studies course Nathan Pusey envisioned and the current version, the fundamental principles and procedures of the course have remained the same. The primary emphasis, as we have seen, remains the close examination of individual works of historical or cultural significance, with the development of skills in reading, writing, speaking, and clear thinking as an important by-product. The primacy of the individual works is emphasized by structuring the reading lists without chronological order, though the supplementary lectures will sometimes seek to place those works in a historical context.

The particular works you will encounter are drawn from a much longer list of works compiled by the faculty in each of the University's five main divisions: the humanities, the sciences, the social sciences, the fine arts, and music.

Works that have often been used in the course include, to name a few, Plato's Republic, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Locke's Second Treatise on Government, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

Works on the longer divisional lists from which the actual readings are drawn vary widely; currently they include, in a very brief sampling: The Federalist Papers, Richard Feynman's QED, Duke Ellington's Concerto for Cootie, Shakespeare's Othello, Homer's Odyssey, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Kurosawa's Rashomon, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene, and Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture.

Naturally, given the diverse interests of the faculty, the reading lists, which are revised annually, represent something of a compromise between various ideal lists, and any particular faculty member (or student, for that matter) might quibble with this or that inclusion or omission. Nonetheless, the works in the course represent the faculty's collective judgment of what makes for a coherent sampling of compelling and diverse works from oth the Western and non-Western traditions. In no way, however, is the reading list of Freshman Studies meant to be inclusive; in no way is it meant to represent the summation of what an educated person ought to know. Rather, it is meant as a starting place for your education, which is to say an opening toward many other important works that are not taught or listed in the course itself.

But still, one might ask, why these works and not others? Who has the right to decide which works are "compelling"? What makes a work "worth knowing"? What, in short, is a "significant work" and how is it relevant to the world today?

Not long ago, such questions seemed relatively easy to answer. One spoke of "classic" works,  which, because of their excellence and insight, have influenced the thinking of a large number of people over a long period of time. The "classics" were worth knowing, one would have said, because they are the building blocks of our civilization, the embodiment of those thoughts and values that give us power over our environment and separate us from savagery.

Nowadays, however, both the notion of the "classic" and its role in education are the subject of considerable dispute.

The dispute arises because in courses centered on "classic" texts, the reading lists were drawn almost wholly from European civilization, and the works themselves, because of the old traditions of separation of labor by gender, were mostly the expressions of European men. In the view of  the critics, a study of "classics," traditionally defined, failed to give fair representation to the experience of women, non-white ethnic groups, or that large majority of people who live outside of Europe and America. Some go so far as to say that the very definition of a "classic" is sexist, racist, and Eurocentric.

Traditionalists tend to respond to such criticisms by arguing that the contemporary world, for better or worse, was shaped to an unusual extent by the works of Europeans, and mostly European men. There are significant, and no doubt regrettable, reasons why this is true, they say, reasons having to do with almost universal oppression of women until recent times and the historical accidents that brought technology, and thus global power, to Europe first; but even if one believes that the dominance of white males in the Western tradition is pernicious -- even if one believes the dominant tradition of Western thought itself is pernicious -- one still must understand how it came into being, the traditionalists conclude, if one is to change it.

Whichever side of this on-going debate one chooses, the fact remains that many recent works of feminism, ethnicity, and Third World concerns are often written in reaction to the formerly dominant traditions and "classics" of the West, and clearly one must know something of those traditions and "classics" if one is going to comprehend the full import of the criticisms. Thus, the current reading lists for Freshman Studies reflect both its own long tradition of treating the "classics" and the more recent trend towards greater diversity and inclusiveness. In this sense, too, Freshman Studies is meant to be nothing more than a starting place for your education.

A NOTE ON SUBJECTIVITY

The history of thought, we have said, is a history of disputes, and in many of the oldest and most fundamental disputes, people still have not arrived at any final agreement. To propose an idea is, after all, to state an opinion, and in matters of intellect, to state an opinion is to start an argument. Plato, for example, believed that the world is made up of eternal and perfect essences, the famous Platonic "forms," and that the changing, imperfect world that we see is a kind of shadow of these essences. Thus, for Plato, it is the "forms" that are worth knowing. Not at all, respond his many critics; reality may be a flux of ever-changing matter, or a manifestation of energy, or the working through in history of a material process, or a creation of the human imagination -- and one readily can add many other influential definitions of reality (with their own implied definitions of what is worth knowing) to that summary list.

It is easy enough to arrive at the conclusion, after a quick glance at the situation, that since there are no settled truths in the great matters of dispute, or even in many of the smaller ones, then all ideas and theories are nothing but opinion. Or, as bewildered students in Freshman Studies sometimes ask, after they have struggled to comprehend a number of alternative responses to a question that remains finally unanswered:

"Isn't it all subjective anyway?"

Certainly if what we mean by "subjective" is that our way of viewing the world and framing our questions about it is determined, in part, by the way our own time and place have shaped our minds -- if we mean that different people simply see some aspects of the world in different ways -- then, yes, there is always an element of subjectivity in any idea, any theory, any philosophy. But that is precisely why the struggle for objectivity is so important, and why we seek to discover how some answers to questions can be judged better than others. Part of what it means to be educated is to acquire the definitions and assumptions about thinking which underlie all intelligent discourse. For example, two plus two is four -- by definition. To insist that it is five is simply to change the meaning of the terms to suit yourself, and unless you can convince me that you have an interesting reason for changing those terms, you have broken the implicit contract of language between us -- that is, we no longer can speak to each other in any meaningful way. To an extent, then, conversation is a matter of agreeing on definitions, and, when there is disagreement, accepting a standard arbiter to mediate between us. (So that, for example, if we disagree about the definition of a particular word we may go to the dictionary to settle the matter.) But beyond definitions, though no idea may be absolutely true, there are some generally accepted procedures and criteria for distinguishing better thoughts from worse ones, and they serve, like definitions, to keep our conversation going. Here are some of those criteria:

Unless we begin by agreeing to principles such as these -- principles that rise above mere subjectivity -- communication becomes impossible, and whatever questions we frame, whatever answers we find, will remain mute and useless.

So, no, it's not all subjective anyway!