Defending the Humanities

Defending the One Percent

I magine a society with perfect economic equality. Perhaps out of sheer coincidence, the supply and demand for different types of labor happen to produce an equilibrium in which everyone earns exactly the same income. As a result, no one worries about the gap between the rich and poor, and no one debates to what extent public policy should make income redistribution a priority. Because people e...

Defending the Dynamical Hypothesis

Defending Diversity

Why do some observations lead to broad generalizations whereas other observations do not have as much influence on people's beliefs? One principle of evaluating evidence is the diversity principle, which states that more diverse evidence should lead to stronger inferences than a narrow sample of evidence. For example, if you see someone repeatedly acting aggressively while giving lectures, you ...

Defending Abduction

Charles S. Peirce argued that, besides deduction and induction, there is a third mode of inference which he called "hypothesis" or "abduction". He characterized abduction as reasoning "from effect to cause", and as "the operation of adopting an explanatory hypothesis". Peirce's ideas about abduction, which are related also to historically earlier accounts of heuristic reasoning (the method of a...

Center for the Humanities

CHUM214 The Modern and the Postmodern In this course we will examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last 200 years. Our readings will be drawn from a variety of areas-philosophy, novels, music, painting, and photograph...