By discovering or creating links between areas of knowledge and ways of knowing that are currently segregated by disciplines and departments, IPHS encourages students to think holistically and critically about these works. It also provides students with the opportunity to experiment with an array of expressive media, including essays, films, multimedia presentations, graphic arts, and plays. These projects enable students to develop their craft in written communication, oral communication, critical thinking, and new media skills, including design and composition. This unique approach to learning allows students to work closely with their professors. IPHS promotes a sense of community in which intellectual differences are respected and intellectual ties and relations are forged.
Enrollment is limited.
Look for the symbol, which designates the courses appropriate for first-year students new to the IPHS curriculum. In the first semester, we explore the themes of love and justice, purity and power, fidelity to the family, and loyality to the state. With the Hebrew Bible, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, and Dante, we investigate these themes through the JudeoChristian and GrecoRoman traditions and their European legacies. In the second semester, we focus on the themes of law and disorder, harmony and entropy, and modernity and its critics. Beginning with Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Hobbes, we investigate the desire to construct a unified vision through reason and the disruption of that vision in the works of such authors as Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx.