Completion of these three courses also accounts for about half of the Humanities Minor in Liberal Studies. Students are introduced to some of the fundamental issues of the Western tradition, such as the nature of the individual, the relation of the individual to the city or empire, attitudes toward death and the afterlife, the roles of women in society, and beliefs about the gods. The course helps students to place their own values in historical perspective, and introduces them to some of the stories and symbols which have provided the vocabulary for the ongoing discussion of human values. LBRL 122 Focuses on culture and society in medieval and early modern Europe. The effort to define a consistent worldview encompassing both pagan antiquity and Christianity is described and the challenges to this worldview from both rationalism and natural science are explored.
All sections read the Inferno of Dante.
LBRL 123 Explores the ways in which Western understandings of the world have produced, and reacted to, the industrial and scientific revolutions. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course deals with new understandings of the relationship of the individual to society and the physical universe, the emergence of modern ideologies, including the crisis of belief and the conflict of differing systems of thought in the contemporary world. The Freshman Humanities Sequence Special sections of the above courses, numbered 121a, 122a, 123a, are reserved for entering freshmen only and must be taken in sequential order beginning with LBRL 121a in the fall. It is designed to provide a careful introduction to academic life for students. Special attention is given to expository writing.