Photo by Kris Snibbe. Three professors sit in a classroom talking. The idea is to highlight the ways that members of their respective disciplines think. And when those professors are Alan Dershowitz of the Law School, Harvey Cox of the Divinity School, and Stephen Jay Gould of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, this idea really works.
University educations have become too specialized, the professors say.
By thinking about their own ways of thinking, and understanding how people in other fields think, students can become better citizens of both the academy and the wider world. We can talk with each other, we can disagree, we can agree, but we're not incommunicado. The course, broadly speaking, looks at sources of authority in each field, definitions of truth, and the processes by which lawyers, scientists, and theologians arrive at those truths. The professors debate a series of topics, each of which serves as a lens, clarifying their views. By the end of the semester, they'll have touched on such themes as justice, free will, dissent, approaches to classification, causality and probability, and views of the future.