In developing students as whole persons, we help students to understand that their personal development is both an individual achievement and an appropriated heritage. Emphasis is placed on how different positions on the same issue develop, how conflict originates, moves forward, is resolved for a time, and reemerges in new forms in later periods. Concern is shown for what is required to resolve intellectual, social, and cultural conflict or to affirm that a position is true or satisfactory. T ransdisciplinary courses have developed because philosophical questions lie at the base of all human endeavor whether theortical or practical.
Transdisciplinary courses take different forms.
These courses require students to employ the data of the human or natural sciences in order to understand and judge what is real and worthwhile. Other courses, like philosophy of science or law, take the conscious operations of the intelligent practionner of a discipline to ask foundational questions about how we know, what we know when engaged in seeking to know, and what role values play in the discipline. Still other courses expect student to draw from their personal experience of some of the most basic, enduring, and universal dimensions of human living like love, self-understanding, and the quest for a meaningful life. H istorical courses in which students trace out the development, through conflict and resultion, of foundational notions of human being in relation to what we may know, do and hope for. Students are shown how answers to perennial human questions shape human understanding and so shape our personal and collective history by informing cultural beliefs, social institutions, and human expectations.