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The Perspectives Program at Boston College
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The Perspectives Program is a four-year, interdisciplinary course of study grounded in the great texts of Western Culture that seeks to integrate the humanities and natural sciences. The idea of this four-year interdisciplinary program comes out of the Jesuit context of higher education in which study of the humanities, especially philosophy and theology, properly contextualizes both professional and scientific education. The program seeks to liberate the student both intellectually and spiritually from various forms of cultural indoctrination, habit, and prejudices that can enslave him or her. It seeks to form students who are intelligent, responsible, reasonable, and attentive. The overall vision of this four-year program is that men and women are oriented in freedom towards transcendence. WHO ARE WE? Where do we come from, and where are we going?
In every historical period, certain fundamental questions about this universe and about our common human destiny have recurred. Yet, given the current climate of cultural amnesia regarding these fundamental questions, the four-year Perspectives Program is designed to help us not only remember our intellectual and spiritual heritage, but appropriate it anew. It gives students the opportunity of working out for themselves a set of coherent answers to the enduring questions. It brings faculty and students into conversation with the ancient, modern, and contemporary thinkers who have shaped our intellectual and spiritual heritage and who continue to influence the course of our community living. In short, the Perspectives Program was developed as an art of restoration, that is the recovery of a tradition of education that understands the love of learning as the desire for God.
The department also offers a Honors Major in the Perspective Program.
Finally, all four of the Perspectives courses are year-long, double credit with an evening class component. Each Perspectives course fulfills the following core requirements:
PERSPECTIVES I: Perspectives on Western Culture
6 credits philosophy
6 credits theology
Perspectives I is structured either implicitly or explicitly by the Socratic question "what is the best way to live"? In the first semester, students deal with two of what may be termed "spiritual eruptions": the rise of Greek philosophy, and the Judeo-Christian experience of God's self revelation in history. These two spiritual eruptions are the principle foundations of Western Civilization, the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem.
The second semester begins by focusing on the ideas that mark the thinkers of the renaissance as typically and emphatically modern, despite their substantial differences. Instead of treating modernity as a simple process of secularization, the semester proceeds to examine not only the theological reactions to secularism say in Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Newman, but also the way theological concerns shape modernity, e.g., Luther, Kant, Hegel, Barth.
PERSPECTIVES II: Modernism and the Arts
6 credits philosophy
3 credits fine arts
3 credits literature core
By the time the students begin Perspectives II, he or she will have already explored the most fundamental questions of meaning and value found in the great philosophical and religious traditions of the West. Perspectives II confronts the student with the classical question: Can one discover a common cultural vision informing the literature, music, painting, sculpture and architecture of a specific historical period? The specific historical period selected is the one that bridges the late 19th and 20th century and has often been characterized as the ge of modernism. Students will explore each of the five areas in order to identify and relate some distinctive features that appear with the emergence of twentieth-century culture.
In addition to grappling with the issue of Modernism, the students will also have the opportunity to explore through the various artistic media questions of a philosophical and religious nature. Reading Doestoevsky's Crime and Punishment or Brothers Karamazov alongside Flaubert and Nietzsche or Eliot's Wasteland, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets alongside Kafka and Woolfe opens the student up to the possibility of encountering a distinctly religious response to the dilemmas of modernism: the fragmentation of culture and fracturing of the notion of self. Musically, special attention is given to the spiritual roots of Jazz, a source that is made explicit in W.E.B. DuBois' Sorrow Songs.
PERSPECTIVES III: Horizon of the New Social Sciences
6 credits philosophy
6 credits social sciences
Perspectives III aims to show how secular man of modern times has attempted through the social sciences to work out concretely the new political, intellectual and institutional structures that will provide meaning and stability for a this-worldly existence as other-worldly goals have progressively provided less and less illumination and determination for modern living. No longer looking to God or an institutional church for ultimate values and goals, Western man has found it increasingly necessary to devise and develop those new disciplines that would provide a new understanding of governance, law and other social and economic relationship to replace the understanding and guidelines that in past centuries were supplied by the Torah and the church.
Civil order having been thus established on a secular basis, a new material prosperity; the new science of law, which owes little or nothing to medieval conceptions; and, finally, the new science of sociology that proposes to understand social life in all its varied manifestations.
One of the issues the students encounter is the great church-state debate of the late medieval and early modern period. This often fills a gap in the students' education, since they are typically unaware that there is a religious, indeed an ecclesial, subtext to the great political debates and movements of the modern world. In the course of reading authors such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, we not only stress the importance of the church-state issue, but the way Christian conceptions of freedom and dignity of the individual inform modern self understanding.
PERSPECTIVES IV: New Scientific Visions
6 credits philosophy
6 credits philosophy
3 credits math
or
6 credits physcial sciences
3 credits physical sciences
The world is ultimately intelligible: all of us, students and scientists alike, assume this, by assuming that it is possible to explain how and why things happen. Yet most people still live with relatively simple assumptions about the natures of things.
This course is a ‘guided tour’ that leads beyond the familiar land of ordinary Newtonian experience, into the strange and mysterious territory of contemporary thinking in science and mathematics. The goal is not merely to introduce students to an understanding of scientific discovery, through several simple yet creative projects.
The first semester begins with the ancient Greek thinkers, who (surprising though it may seem) identified and explored problems in science and mathematics that are well beyond the understanding of even highly educated people today. From there, the course moves to the conceptual revolution that lay behind the seventeenth-century break-through to modern science and the nearly mystical enthusiasm of the time for the explanatory power of mathematical demonstration. After examining the interpretation of human being as a mere, though complex, machine, the course takes up the problems that calculus was invented to solve - and the deeper issues opened up by the very brilliance of this solution. Who would have dreamed that such an amazingly powerful tool could be stumped by the trivial problem of analyzing the motion of a simple guitar string? So it was, however, until another genius arrived with a new solution, the theory of functions.
The second semester takes up the shifts from mechanistic explanation to the more recent view of explanation in terms of functions and relations, and from determinism to randomness and probability. The current understanding of the universe will be examined in relation to the modern concept of energy, the unimaginable and paradoxical results of modern mathematics, quantum theory's continuity with previous developments in the science of heat and energy, and the ‘state of the art’ in contemporary evolutionary biology.
PERSPECTIVES I (Perspectives
on Western Culture) Reading List
FIRST SEMESTER: Ancient
and Medieval Thought
Where is this Athens that everyone is talking about?
- Plato, Ion, Meno, Republic, Apology, and Crito
- Aristosphanes, The Clouds
- Sophocles, Antigone or Oedipus the King or both
- Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics and Politics (selections)
“He has showed you, O man, what is good”
- The books of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy (selections), Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah (selections), and Amos
- The Code of Hammurabi and the Gilgamesh Epic (selections)
- The Book of Job and the Wisdom of Solomon (selections)
- The Gospel of Matthew (selections), the Gospel of John, and the Letter of Paul to the Galatians
- The letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan
- The so-called Letter to Diognetus
- Excerpts from the writings of Tertullian, Basil, Jerome, and Gregory of Nazianzus
- Augustine, Confessions (selections) and The City of God (Book XIX)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (selections) and the Summa Theologiae (selections)
SECOND SEMESTER: From the Renaissance to the Present
The emergence of modern thought.
- Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (selections)
- Hobbes, Leviathan (selections)
- Locke, Second Treatise of Government (selections) and A Letter Concerning Toleration
- Bacon, The Great Insaturation (selections) and The New Organon (selections)
- Luther, On Christian Liberty
- Pascal, Pensees (selections)
- Descartes, Discourse on Method or the Meditations or both
The crisis of modern thought.
- Rousseau, the first and second Discourses; Social Contract (selections)
- Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and essays on universal history and eternal peace.
- Hegel, Reason in History and Philosophy of Right (selections)
- Marx, The Communist Manifesto, German Ideology (selections) and the Theses on Feuerbach (selections)
- Martin Luther King, Jr. “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”
The demise of rationalism: contemporary philosophical and
theological thought.
- Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Either/Or (selections) and The Present Age
- Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History, Beyond Good and Evil (selections), and Thus Spake Zarathustra
- Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
- Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (selections)
- Barth, The Humanity of God
- Weil, Simone, Waiting for Go