ACTC
The Association for Core Texts and Courses

"Supporting Liberal Arts Core Text Curricula Around the World"

Submitted Proposals for the
2008 ACTC Annual Conference

Number: 59.

Title of Paper Proposal: H.G. Wells on being an engineer

Core text discussed: Tono Bungay, by H.G. Wells

Date Submitted: 12/10/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Who am I? This question about personal identity is to a great extent answered with reference to an art or profession. However, few of the greater books describe life within professions, and do so in a positive way; one rare case is H.G. Wells' "Tono Bungay". This paper shows how the book addresses important questions about being an engineer, that may help students to understand fundamental contemporary tensions in their profession.

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Number: 58.

Title of Paper Proposal: "The Realization of Human Uniqueness as a Culmination of Scientific and Revealed Thought " by Alicia Cordoba Tait and Alfred R. Martin

Core text discussed: Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas and Cosmic Jackpot, "Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life" by Paul Davies

Date Submitted: 12/10/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Are we humans just one type of sentient and technological beings inhabiting the universe or are we unique? Certainly, the Principle of Mediocrity suggests that we should not be unique or even especially important in the cosmic scheme; however, our view of Man from revealed religion and even from modern science may indeed suggest that we hold some special significance. Some scientists argue that the 'fine tuning' of our universe and the many propitious conditions which allowed the evolution of life on Earth make sentient life highly unlikely. We will explore the contentious question: 'is this mere coincidence, or do physical and biological evolution, as well as revealed texts suggest a universe which was made for the evolution of human life?'

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Number: 57.

Title of Paper Proposal: Dividing Lines: Mathematics and Wisdom

Core text discussed: Plato's Republic

Date Submitted: 12/09/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Plato's Republic recounts an ancient quarrel over which education best enables us to become who we are. Socrates argues that, for the perfection of our nature, philosophy should orient education in both poetry and mathematics. This talk considers the place of mathematics in liberal education and the well-ordered soul by asking, how much mathematics do we need to become wise? The divided line image is used and transformed to display Platonic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and anti- Cartesian answers.

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Number: 56.

Title of Paper Proposal: Plato's Republic and the Student as Craftsman

Core text discussed: Plato's Republic

Date Submitted: 12/07/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In Book I of The Republic, Plato defines a "craft" as an art that is practiced for the benefit of others. After taking my freshmen through Plato's argument-after which they are thoroughly convinced that no true craft is practiced for the benefit of the craftsman-I ask them to ponder the following question before our next class: As freshmen at Samford, what craft are you practicing? The next class is always one of the more interesting of the semester as my freshmen struggle to define how they are practicing their craft of "studentship" for the benefit of others. This exercise helps my students to think more deeply about who they are-and what is their purpose-in the larger university community.

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Number: 55.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Character of Obligation in Thoreau

Core text discussed: "Walden" and "Life without Principle" and "Civil Disobedience"

Date Submitted: 12/06/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Thoreau embraces a romantic individualism which stresses the duty of the individual to cultivate his/her uniqueness. In my courses, students not only relate to this claim, but embrace it. In my paper, I explain Thoreau's argument and its flaws in an effort to help my students develop a more skeptical stance.

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Number: 54.

Title of Paper Proposal: Henry V, Machiavellian King

Core text discussed: Shakespeare\'s Henry V

Date Submitted: 12/05/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Henry V is Shakespeare's answer to the vexing question of how an ideal Machiavellian prince can successfully work in history.

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Number: 53.

Title of Paper Proposal: We Are Augustine: Confessions in the Classroom

Core text discussed: "The Confessions of St. Augustine"

Date Submitted: 12/05/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Augustine's Confessions can serve as a catalyst for analysis of the ways in which communities are created through shared story in Classical texts, which in turn enables students to glean the ways in which Augustine both relies upon and transforms inherited conventions of literary experience to both invent the silent, solo reader and connect that reader to a community through shared texts. Students thus find themselves written into Augustine's "Confessions" both as convention and as innovation.

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Number: 52.

Title of Paper Proposal: Cassandra: Aeschylus and C.K. Williams

Core text discussed: Aeschylus "Agamemnon" and Williams "Cassandra; Iraq"

Date Submitted: 12/05/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Aeschylus's Cassandra portrays the conflict between brilliance of mind and the weakness of the victim--a conflict at the heart of tragedy. Her struggle looks back to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and forward to the resolution constructed by Athena in "The Eumenides." To embody his frustration and anguish over the Iraq War, C.K. Williams has caught the essence of that tragedy and mirrors the the Aeschylean tragedy. He has not only "read" the Core text, but re-imagined it.

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Number: 51.

Title of Paper Proposal: Reason and Foreign Policy: Aeschylus' The Suppliants

Core text discussed: Aeschylus, The Suppliants

Date Submitted: 12/04/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Using Eric Voegelin's essay "Reason: The Classic Experience" as a theoretical foundation, this paper will examine the decision-making process that takes place in The Suppliants as the people of Argos decide whether to grant sexual asylum to the 50 daughters of Danaus. It will be argued that the expansive form of reason used in making the decision in favor of the women forms a model that could help contemporary international relations theory escape its present limitations. It also forms an excellent answer to the question posed in the conference theme- "Who Are We?"

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Number: 50.

Title of Paper Proposal: Art and Revolution in Goya's Paintings

Core text discussed: The paintings of Francisco Goya

Date Submitted: 12/04/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Goya refused to answer the question 'who are we?' with a partisan reply, and the way in which he refused is a measure of his greatness. Ideally his work inspires students to confront the dark side of our species without ideological bias. Even in our image saturated age, his work can stimulate imaginations to transcend the present and to tolerate ambiguity. Goya also helps students answer the question of identity by showing that we are beings who imagine.

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Number: 49.

Title of Paper Proposal: Making Ourselves Unhappy: Rousseau's Condemnation of the Bourgeois

Core text discussed: Rousseau's Emile

Date Submitted: 12/03/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Rousseau's critique of the dividedness of the bourgeois soul is so rhetorically powerful as to generate disgust with, if not hatred of, modern liberal democracy and its characteristic human type. Rousseau's formula for human happiness, as brought to life in the person of Emile, necessitates rejection of politics in favor of private life. The paper examines the merits of Rousseau's vision on its own terms and in light of the American aspiration of individual achievement.

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Number: 48.

Title of Paper Proposal: Freedom, Justice, and Empire

Core text discussed: Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War

Date Submitted: 11/28/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Explores problems and paradoxes of democratic imperialism as concerns the question of justice and virtue, with an eye towards the contemporary American situation.

CONFERENCE PANEL PROPOSAL

Title of panel: Are we free? Is freedom good?

Six Sentence Abstract of panel and your paper:
Will examine some problems or challenges to freedom from a variety of perspectives: Thucydides, Plato, and (perhaps) Aristophanes

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Number: 47.

Title of Paper Proposal: Arthur Miller's P.-C. 'Adaptation' of Ibsen's 'Enemy'

Core text discussed: Ibsen/Miller, 'An Enemy of the People'

Date Submitted: 11/28/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
The integrity of a text derives its authority, naturally enough, from its author. Arthur Miller's 'adaptation' of Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People' violates that integrity through a re-vision, a 'seeing-again' of the story with a 'single vision'--here, a liberal political program--that so distorts the original as to trivialize and so nullify its moral/aesthetic value. Ibsen, a master ironist, was the opposite of his protagonist, Dr. Stockmann, who is a zealot; and of Arthur Miller, who is a liberal activist if not ideologue. Ibsen's 'Enemy' is a great Core Text; Miller's adulterated version is a clumsy tract.

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Number: 46.

Title of Paper Proposal: Who We Are Through Family And Friends

Core text discussed: The Book of Genesis and The Iliad

Date Submitted: 11/28/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Who we are is determined in part by two central relations we have with other people: family and friends. Two figures exhibit the powerful influence of these relations, Abraham through family and Achilles through friendship. However, these figures appear to do so to the exclusion of one or the other: Abraham has no friends and Achilles has no family. Is it the case that both relations are necessary for determining who we are?

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Number: 45.

Title of Paper Proposal: Plato's Timaeus, Quantum Mechanics, and the Pythagorean Dream

Core text discussed: Timaeus

Date Submitted: 11/28/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In the Republic, Plato criticized the way the Pythagoreans studied astronomy and harmony; in the Timaeus, he offered an alternative approach to physics yielding what is only a "likely story." Classical mechanics seemed to vindicate the Pythagorean approach, but quantum mechanics has changed all that. So where are we now in the old Pythagorean/Platonic debate? Have we abandoned the Pythagorean dream and embraced a new Platonic uncertainty? I shall argue that such a conclusion may be too hasty.

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Number: 44.

Title of Paper Proposal: Incorporating Eastern Texts into a Western Core: Teaching the Tao Te Ching in Conversation with Wallace Stevens

Core text discussed: Tao Te Ching

Date Submitted: 11/27/07

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Although the Tao Te Ching is often taught as a political text in humanities surveys, I teach it as a philosophical text that not only offers a different perspective on the fundamental nature of reality, but serves as an instruction manual for what Taoists call "following the natural order." To illuminate and illustrate Lao-tzu, I pair selected chapters from the Tao Te Ching with poems by Wallace Stevens. In a class that begins with Plato's unchanging, essential Forms, this unit of the course shifts focus to a world constantly renewing itself, but instead of reaching for a perfection found elsewhere or striving to control dynamism and change, Taoists try to live in harmony with the environment. The key is to discover and cultivate an authenticity that enables us to live within the rhythms of life, not against them, to behold the external world with our whole being so that it becomes part of us and we of it.

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Number: 43.

Title of Paper Proposal: A New Theory of Fiction in an Uncomfortable Practice of Reading: Virginia Woolf's Pleasure/Bliss in Swann's Way

Core text discussed: Marcel Proust, Swann's Way; Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text; Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Non Moral Sense"; Virginia Woolf, "Phases of Fiction"

Date Submitted: 11/26/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
The value of a core text is in its unpredictability, its capacity to produce new meanings, its potential to become that which has not yet been read-though often it is being reread-and in its plurality, offering, inciting, and valuing alternative perspectives. Roland Barthes explains that the "goal of the literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text." It is with this value of literature, that I recently developed a sophomore level core literature course at Salve Regina University, challenging the notion of a "literary masterpiece" in which studied numerous canonical texts through the lens of Virginia Woolf's 1929 essay "Phases of Fiction," in which she attempts to refashion a theory of fiction. This paper will focus on Woolf's reading of just one author, Marcel Proust, in dialogue with Roland Barthes and Friedrich Nietzsche.

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Number: 42.

Title of Paper Proposal: Tocqueville on the Democratic Self, Public Opinion, and the Problem of Civic Education

Core text discussed: Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"

Date Submitted: 11/23/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
The American of Tocqueville's "Democracy" is a spirited economic dynamo, driven by the pursuit of gain, a god-fearing materialist, partly stabilized by his religious faith but given to irrational bouts of idealistic frenzy, and a timid democrat, a lover of liberty but shaped fundamentally by his experience of equality. This paper will begin by analyzing the "Democracy" and then discuss how Tocqueville's insights on the problem of the democratic self reveal severe challenges for the educator and for the statesman who seek to inspire and lead democratic citizens limited as human beings and citizens by the democratic spirit that governs them. By addressing these insights of Tocqueville, the paper will reflect on who we are as human beings and citizens and who we are as teachers.

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Number: 41.

Title of Paper Proposal: Who We Are through Who We Were: Helping Students Connect with Tradition in a Classics Core

Core text discussed: Gilgamesh, Genesis, Plato's Symposium, Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis, the Aeneid, the Gospel of John, Augustine's Confessions, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Bonaventure's Itinerarium, and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Date Submitted: 11/20/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
After using an anthology of short pieces and excerpts from classical antiquity through out the Middle Ages and finding our students not synthesizing the material into any coherent understanding of western thought, we redesigned our sophomore core course, using only ten select works in their entirety. The redesigned course offers students treatment of recurrent themes throughout the preclassical, classical, and medieval eras, allowing students the opportunity to examine how various ages and cultures have responded to the perennial human questions. Further, not only has the course been able to generate student interest in such course topics as the nature of the human person, love, suffering, and free will, but students report applying the course matter to their own lives. My conference presentation describes this course and its success in getting students to understand themselves and their world by virtue of the classics they may have previously deemed irrelevant.

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Number: 40.

Title of Paper Proposal: Cicero, the Moral Self, and Partial Choices

Core text discussed: Cicero, On Duties

Date Submitted: 11/20/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In Book III of On Duties, Cicero makes use of Plato's story of Gyges' Ring to show that even choices to do moral wrong which are not completely resolved on or which are never acted on are nonetheless themselves morally wrong. This papers explains, develops, and defends Cicero's insight into how less than flow-blown choices also shape the moral self.

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Number: 39.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Great American Misfit

Core text discussed: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Date Submitted: 11/18/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Ernest Hemingway once said that all of American literature emanates from one great book, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I believe that Hemingway was correct, in part because Huck Finn personifies the character we hold most dear in American culture-the misfit. In my paper, I would like to explore, via an exploration of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the conception of the outsider as a fundamental component of "who we are" as Americans. After briefly exploring how the misfit plays a fundamental role in our perceptions of ourselves politically, historically and culturally, I will expand on this notion of the subversive character as fundamental not only to America and its literature (including the likes of Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville) but as an important part of the Western literary tradition from the time of the very first novel, Cervantes' Don Quixote. As such, a liberal arts education aims to teach us, among other things, one crucial value-that to be critical of the world you live in, to be uncomfortable with convention, is, paradoxically, a primordial value of core texts. Thus, more than simply guarding extant traditions, our very own notions of "who we are" suggest that it is our tradition to be non-traditional.

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Number: 38.

Title of Paper Proposal: Empire and Freedom

Core text discussed: Aristophanes Birds

Date Submitted: 11/15/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper examines the limits and nature of democratic imperialism.

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Number: 37.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Lives of the Soul in Plato's "Republic"

Core text discussed: Plato's "Republic"

Date Submitted: 11/14/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Plato's "Republic" is intended to provide an account of justice in terms of the parts of the soul, and thus focuses on a philosophical account of the nature of the soul and the virtues that ought to be present in it. However, the "Republic" also is a dramatic work that reveals to the attentive reader what a life lived would look like in which each of the respective parts dominate; it does this by providing representative characters who reveal the need for a properly-oriented soul. Thus, the dramatic effect allows the reader to "visualize" the soul and, in doing so, ask him- or herself what it means to live a good life. The transformative effect arises when we allow the lives of the soul to be seen and ask ourselves who we are as well as who we could be were we to heed the call of virtue.

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Number: 36.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Monochord Laboratory: A Practical Means of Introducing Music into General Liberal Arts Curricula

Core text discussed: None

Date Submitted: 11/14/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper will describe with some visual demonstration of the adaptation of the St. John's Monochord laboratory, designed by Peter Kalkavage of St. Johns, to the teaching of science and music in the Program of Liberal Studies at Dame. In this presentation, drawing upon a similar laboratory conducted at the ACTC summer "Bridging the Gap" Seminar of 2005, the use of this simple laboratory will be described. The way in which this has been integrated with the reading of Plato's Timaeus and study of Euclid in the Science tutorials and the use of this laboratory in Music Tutorials in the Program of Liberal Studies at Notre Dame will be demonstrated. The paper will also deal with the elements of musical theory that are gained from this experience.

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Number: 35.

Title of Paper Proposal: Who Are We, Whose Are We? Women As the Agents of Change in the Hebrew Bible

Core text discussed: Hebrew Bible

Date Submitted: 11/14/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Women in biblical antiquity lived in a patriarchal society where men created and enforced the laws, dominated religious and political life, and had the final say in matters pertaining to all facets of family life. Women were subordinate to men, indeed "owned" by men and would therefore answer the question "Who am I" in terms of belonging to a particular man. The vast majority of women in the Hebrew Bible are unnamed, known only, for example, as "The Wife of Manoah" or "The Daughters of Lot." But, a deeper reading of the women stories presents us with a larger question beyond "Who am I?" The real question for biblical women is "Whose am I?" The answer, made clear through her recurring role as harbinger of God's word or initiator of God's plan, is a resounding: "You belong to God." Profiling the stories of Rebekah, Tamar, Rahab, and Delilah, this paper seeks to explore the biblical role of women as God's agents of change. Further, this paper will examine Israel's destiny, female identity, and the profound theological implications of the Hebrew Bible's women stories, both then and now.

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Number: 34.

Title of Paper Proposal: Redefining authorial identity: Directors' cameos in North By Northwest and The 400 Blows

Core text discussed: Hitchcock's North By Northwest and Truffaut's 400 Blows

Date Submitted: 11/09/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest and François Truffaut's 400 Blows were both released in 1959, a time when questions of identity --individual and cultural--were coming into sharpening focus in the US and abroad. Made at the height of the director's career, Hitchcock's VistaVision extravaganza emphasizes suspenseful complications arising from a search for renewed identity (Cary Grant as R. O. Thornhill qua George Kaplin); whereas Truffaut's black-and-white wide-screen experiment (his first feature film) chronicles a youth's rocky advance into adolescence. Both movies invoke questions of viewer "identification" while suggesting tantalizing avenues for socio-biographical and thematic analysis. In particular, the directors' cameo appearances are emblematic and expressive of larger issues of identity in these films and their core contexts.

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Number: 33.

Title of Paper Proposal: Who Are We? Core Texts and the Disciplines

Core text discussed: Conference Panel Proposal

Date Submitted: 11/08/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Who are we? Within the academy, "we" is always plural, typically divided along disciplinary lines. What takes priority is an overriding concern for contrasting the way in which "we" philosophers frame the question, versus the way in which "we" anthropologists frame it, versus "we" historians, "we" scientists, and so on. As much as attention to this diversity can enrich our understanding of the complex reality of what it means to be human, exclusive attention to discipline-based differences can occlude that very same question. How do core texts help us to think about this issue? How do core texts help us both to more deeply appreciate what is at stake in the differences among the disciplines, and, at the same time, possibly to transcend those differences?

We propose a panel devoted to exploring an alternative understanding of the relationship between core texts and interdisciplinarity. The first paper will take its cue from Thoreau's image of "roots and branches" in order to theorize an understanding of core texts as pre-disciplinary. The second will develop this alternative model of the relationship between core texts and the disciplines by reflecting on concrete institutional practices.

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Number: 32.

Title of Paper Proposal: Music as a Liberal Art: An Ancient Discipline for the New Millennium

Core text discussed: references to Plato's Republic

Date Submitted: 11/07/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper addresses the role of music in classical and modern liberal education, fostering a reflection on how we relate to our original pedagogical tradition and what is the value and role of music in contemporary liberal programs. During the golden age of the classical era, both Plato and his friend Archytas of Tarentum attributed to music a fundamental pedagogic and hermeneutical role (together with mathematics, geometry, and astronomy), as a study of harmonious proportions regulating the cosmos and as a discipline able to liberate the mind by means of a process of abstraction. While it would be unrealistic today to attribute to music the same role in modern liberal education, the study of music-as-a-liberal-art can help students to bridge the gap between sciences and humanities and - within the humanities - between broad sociological or contextual approaches and structuralism, addressing questions of the universality of certain mathematical constructs and their presence in a variety of strikingly different musical works and practices coming from the past and inhabiting our present musical culture.

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Number: 31.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Story of Ota Benga, The Pygmy in the Zoo

Core text discussed: Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo

Date Submitted: 11/06/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper will introduce a new text for the core, the true story of Ota Benga, the pygmy on display in the Bronx Zoo. The story awakens in all of us our need to really think about who are We and who is included in the We. This text could be useful in many disciplines such as literature, religion, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the history of science. Connections with other readings, such as Edward Said's Reflection on Exile and Conrad's Heart of Darkness will be made.

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Number: 30.

Title of Paper Proposal: Good Cop, Bad Cop: Interrogating Human Nature with Mencius and Xunzi

Core text discussed: Mencius book 6A; Xunzi Chapter 23

Date Submitted: 11/06/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In The Analects Confucius does not clearly decide whether humans are good or bad by nature. Mencius argues we are good, while Xunzi argues we are evil. These arguments will be examined with reference to those of Locke and Hobbes.

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Number: 29.

Title of Paper Proposal: Teaching in the Eternal City with Core Texts

Core text discussed: Augustus' Res Gestae Divi Augusti and Thomas de Celano's Dies Irae

Date Submitted: 11/05/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper will address ways in which core texts might be used to enhance students' appreciation of history, art, and architecture while studying abroad. This methodology, hopefully, is one that could be useful in other disciplines such as literature, religion, politics, and classical studies. Using Rome as a model, together with a selection of core texts that provide insights into relevant cultural and aesthetic themes and issues, suggestions will be made on how to select and to use core texts in ways that will enhance students' liberal learning experience. Some examples would include the Ara Pacis monument and the Res Gestae Divi Augustae, or Michelangelo's Last Judgement fresco and the Dies Irae of Thomas de Celano.

CONFERENCE PANEL PROPOSAL

Title of panel: Teaching Abroad with Core Texts

Six Sentence Abstract of panel and your paper:
Study Abroad Programs have become increasingly popular. Ideally, a course that is taught "abroad" should be interdisciplinary and should provide a rich and meaningful learning experience for students. The challenge, however, of engaging students in a memorable learning experience, grounded in the Liberal Arts tradition, is challenging. This panel welcomes ideas and suggestions of ways in which core texts might be used to help students make interdisciplinary connections and to understand the important historical and cultural contributions that are concretely embedded in the forms of existing monuments, forms not readily encountered without the experience of traveling abroad.

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Number: 28.

Title of Paper Proposal: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary

Core text discussed: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary

Date Submitted: 11/02/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Emma Bovary, the heroine of Flaubert's most renowned novel, is a woman who hungers for the richness of human experience and whose heart is eager to embrace the highest human ideals. The action of Flaubert's novel, however, demonstrates that the fulfillment of such yearnings and their ability to contribute to the well-being of society itself depends not simply on the cultivation of the intellect but on the education of the desires, the affections, and even the senses. The absence of such education in Emma's life means that her potential to do good, a potential that is more evident in her than perhaps in any other character in the novel, is never realized. The novel's implication is that--perhaps contrary to the Rousseauean thesis--the education of both the human heart and mind is a prerequisite for the good society.

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Number: 27.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Core Curriculum: Writing, Religion, Science and Global Warming

Core text discussed: Genesis (1-11), Darwin (Descent of Man), Galileo trial

Date Submitted: 11/01/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
I am currently teaching a pilot course entitled Christianity and Culture in Dialogue, a writing course which will be part of Seton Hall University's Core Curriculum beginning in Fall 2008. My paper will focus on the ways to connect texts from various disciplines to modern issues. The paper will focus on one of the assignments using the the texts of Genesis (1-11), Darwin (Descent of Man), and Galileo (the trial of Galileo), focusing on the ways in which scientific discoveries allowed for a disconnection to religious faith, from the denial of Galileo's discoveries to Darwin's theories to the science of global warming.

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Number: 26.

Title of Paper Proposal: Hearing voices: Socrates and his Daimonion

Core text discussed: Plato's Apology

Date Submitted: 11/01/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
The core texts are important in part because they challenge our ways of thinking and being. At first glance, we may believe that Socrates in Plato's Apology thinks just like us, seeing him as a man among superstitious natives who shines the light of reason upon their idols and who is executed as a result. However, a more careful reading shows that Socrates too seems to be a man of superstition, obeying a daimonion without requiring any explanations, talking about receiving guidance through divination and dreams, and claiming to be on a divine mission. I will argue that by taking Socrates' references to his daimonion and his mission seriously, we can understand him better and we can see that he might provide a real alternative to our ways of thinking, in particular, by challenging our belief that faith in a voice and belief in a divine mission is incompatible with a commitment to a philosophical way of life.

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Number: 25.

Title of Paper Proposal: Two Models of Self Comportment

Core text discussed: Plato's Republic

Date Submitted: 11/01/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
I describe two models of self-comportment at work in Plato's Republic: The self-mastery model and the harmony model. I argue that both are useful as a means of achieving justice in the soul, but that the self-mastery model has conceptual and practical limitations and that the harmony model offers a more sustainable model.

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Number: 24.

Title of Paper Proposal: Who Are We? We Are Clear Thinkers!

Core text discussed: "The Four Idols" by Francis Bacon

Date Submitted: 10/31/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In "The Four Idols," Francis Bacon points out some of the foibles of human thinking that create pitfalls in the quest for building scientific knowledge. Scientists, like Charles Darwin and Rachel Carson, who were clear thinkers themselves, faced the challenge of presenting their new ideas to audiences who would have been susceptible to Bacon's "Four Idols." The process of analyzing "Natural Selection" by Darwin and "The Sunless Sea" by Carson in terms of "The Four Idols" enables students to identify how scientists have overcome these pitfalls. Consequently, student writers can become more adept at recognizing these foibles in their own minds, and thereby advance at least one step along the path to clear thinking.

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Number: 23.

Title of Paper Proposal: Begin with the End: Edith Wharton's War and Memory

Core text discussed: Son at the Front; In Morocco; selected short stories

Date Submitted: 10/31/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Wharton's experiences in World War I, when she traveled to the front line and worked with refugees, helps define her--and our-- identity as Americans through the way we treat memory and monuments.

CONFERENCE PANEL PROPOSAL

Title of panel: Begin with the End: War and Memorialization as Core Texts in American Culture

Six Sentence Abstract of panel and your paper:
War, and the war story, are always a narrative waiting to happen, and it is a narrative explored in core texts, especially Homer's Iliad and Edith Wharton's World War I texts. We begin with the funerals and memorializations, looking at how the culture/nation treats the identity of the dead. What tribute defines the person? We analyze architectural as well as concrete and textual monuments to answer the question "Who are we?"

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Number: 22.

Title of Paper Proposal: Whitman's Epic America

Core text discussed: Leaves of Grass

Date Submitted: 10/29/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Louise Cowan argues that epic poetry creates a nation's identity. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman takes pains to create an identity for Americans. My paper explores how Whitman uses the epic form to carefully craft a powerful new optimistic identity for Americans. While his work is grounded in the earlier form of the epic, Whitman enlarges the form, and thereby, offers new possibilities for American identity.

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Number: 21.

Title of Paper Proposal: John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" and Who We Are

Core text discussed: Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity"

Date Submitted: 10/26/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" was a sermon preached aboard the Arbella, the ship bringing settlers out of England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As an example of Puritan theology, it is of some interest, in particular in giving a lucid view of the Calvinist understanding of Providence and the immigrants' analogy of themselves to the Israelites delivered out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan. But its most important lessons are about what America and Americans have meant, in at least one important interpretation, since the beginning of English settlement on these shores. By contrast with interpretations that view the American as an atomistic individual driven by self-interest and acquisitiveness and ready to practice violence against his fellows, Winthrop calls for a peaceful system of mutual support and a semi-communist attitude toward resources. More important, he calls on the Massachusetts colony to be a "city on a hill." While President Reagan misused this phrase to mean "we are exceptional and all who see us envy us," Winthrop's purpose was to call his fellows to a higher and more awed understanding of their responsibilities-a kind of American exceptionalism that calls for responsibility, not self-satisfaction, and humility instead of boasting.

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Number: 20.

Title of Paper Proposal: Lolita Is No Wimp

Core text discussed: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

Date Submitted: 10/24/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955), Lolita is no wimp, nobody's fool. That she is resilient and resourceful strikes home. Mid way through the novel Lolita, with certain pubescent bravado and flirtatiousness, recounts her forays into her nascent sexuality. The ironic tone Lolita uses belies not only her audacity and intelligence but also a cold-hearted cruelty that has a flip side: aesthetic bliss.

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Number: 19.

Title of Paper Proposal: Descartes and the Existentialists: The Continuing Fruitfulness of the "Cogito"

Core text discussed: Descartes, DISCOURSE ON METHOD & MEDITATIONS

Date Submitted: 10/21/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Descartes believed he was making a fresh beginning in philosophy by rooting all human knowledge in the individual consciousness, symbolized in the famous "Cogito ergo sum." With considerable justification this is taken as the starting-point of modern philosophy. There is a direct line of influence from Descartes to Kant to Husserl and the existentialists. In the paper I will focus on the critical use and new application of the "cogito" by the French existentialists, following Husserl's phenomenology, emphasizing the work of Sartre.

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Number: 18.

Title of Paper Proposal: "Solutions At Our Feet": Reasoning Innocence in Oedipus the King

Core text discussed: Oedipus the King

Date Submitted: 10/21/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
My paper will describe my core course's essay assignment and its two results: students' need to advocate a difficult position--for reasonable doubt about Oedipus's guilt--and the surprising, anti-traditional findings discovered. Like my first-year students, I'll then ponder what Sophocles's tragic play may mean in light of such "new" evidence. Might this drama highlight the ongoing fifth-century debate between the philosophical pluralists and monists? Could the real Sphinx (monstrosity) be rationalist, proto-Platonist reductions of the many into one? Or are we to conclude that Oedipus's tragic "flaw" was not to have reasoned enough against divine oracles and over-determined origins? Two millennia before Freud, did a "complex" or sorts blind the hero to forensic solutions at his feet, predisposing him to confound himself with the "many" he was seeking? Who, then, was Oedipus, and who, as readers and interpreters, are we?

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Number: 17.

Title of Paper Proposal: Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park": A Revolutionary Text

Core text discussed: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Date Submitted: 10/18/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park" (1814), the estate of Mansfield represents England, a supposedly well-governed and orderly "home," opposed to the menacing "other" of the French Revolution and its new morality. On a personal level, the fictional character of Fanny Price seems conservative next to outsiders like Mary and Henry Crawford. However, if we trace her development, Fanny will show herself to be far more revolutionary than they, daring to defy the partiarchal autrhority of Sir Thomas for the sake of her personal happiness. Her situation can be contrasted to Maruqis de Sade's Eugenie from "Philosophy in the Boudoir" (1795), who, despite her revolutionary discourse, adopts the ethos of privilege serving her "masters" and thus denies her own autonomy and personhood.

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Number: 16.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Problem of the Demagogue

Core text discussed: Aristophanes, The Knights

Date Submitted: 10/17/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
What are the characteristics of the demagogue, as Aristophanes presents him? How do we identify demagogues and what is the proper way to deal with them?

CONFERENCE PANEL PROPOSAL

Title of panel: Teaching Aristophanes

Six Sentence Abstract of panel and your paper:
The panel will examine The Clouds, The Frogs, The Birds and The Knights. The focus will be on strategies for teaching such works in the undergraduate classroom. Special attention will be paid to how one makes these classics speak to contemporary students. What perennial issues do they raise and why are Aristophanes' thoughts about those issues of interest?

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Number: 15.

Title of Paper Proposal: Democracy Demands Irony: Rousseau's Civil Religion

Core text discussed: Rousseau's "The Social Contract"

Date Submitted: 10/17/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Rousseau anticipated future problems for democracy when he considered, in his Letter to Voltaire of 1756, in the "Civil Religion" chapter added to the end of The Social Contract in 1761, and in "The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile", the fact that "there is and no longer can be an exclusive national religion". Debates regarding the "truths" claimed by the various religions, in other words, are an unavoidable characteristic of modern society if we, as Rousseau says, "take men as they are". But Rousseau also claimed the presence of a "general will" and an understanding of the common good in men as they are. The people are left to negotiate a way out of these "truth debates" by imagining a "sovereign universal citizen" disassociated from any particular religion.

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Number: 14.

Title of Paper Proposal: Agency and Agony in Oedipus the King

Core text discussed: Sophocles, "Oedipus the King"

Date Submitted: 10/16/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Oedipus the King is often read by students as little more than a platform for discussing malign fate. I contend that Sophocles prompts to audience to explore the ambiguities of rational human responses to adversity. I conclude speculatively that the play must be read in the context of the intellectual debates between the proto-Platonists like Socrates and Sophists like Protagoras.

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Number: 13.

Title of Paper Proposal: Great Books and the Returning Student

Core text discussed: Classics of Western Literature

Date Submitted: 10/11/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Under my direction the Master of Liberal Studies at UNC Charlotte offered a Great Books track for its students. Our students were typically returning students interested in life-long learning or learning for general enlightenment, without any intention of pursuing further academic degrees. Hence they tended to prefer certain texts for various reasons. My presentation will detail my observations teaching Great Books to the returning adult student: which texts they were drawn to, which they had no patience for, and how they tended to approach them.

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Number: 12.

Title of Paper Proposal: Discourse on Inequality: Arguing the Relevance of Rousseau

Core text discussed: Rousseau, The Discourse on Inequality

Date Submitted: 10/10/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality is a core text whose central themes continue to disturb the social and political assumptions of undergraduates and their teachers. Though composed in the context of the French Enlightenment, The Discourse presents, in its paradoxical outline of human history, a critique of concentrated wealth and power that remains pertinent in our era of globalization. Rousseau challenged his contemporaries to reconsider commonplace notions of human nature, and to their dismay interpreted the material progress of civilization as an avenue of moral decline. His hypothesis concerning the origins of inequality, and of tyranny, may still help us to understand their persistence in today's world.

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Number: 11.

Title of Paper Proposal: Who do you say that I am?

Core text discussed: Gospels

Date Submitted: 10/05/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper describes using Dorothy L. Sayers' Man Born to Be King to discuss the identity of Christ. Her plays synthesize the four Gospels and the prefaces and directions to the actors give an insight into Biblical criticism, and the central idea of the Gospels: this is what a perfect human being is. By reading the plays in conjunction with the study of the New Testament, the student is confronted with the questions of what makes a human being and how identity, character and action interrelate.

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Number: 10.

Title of Paper Proposal: Animal and human: New ideas about what we are

Core text discussed: Goodall, Jane and de Waal, Frans: various works

Date Submitted: 10/03/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
What does the work of primatologists Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal tell us about who we are?

Meno frames the discussion in terms of "excellence (areth)" and learning, the same issues that arise in Goodall's Through a Window and de Waal's Good Natured, when we consider "excellence" among the non-human as a window into ourselves.

Research on our close relatives - chimpanzees and bonobos - is providing new insight into both the predispositions we inherit and the importance of the nurture we receive from infancy to adulthood. These studies, along with classic core texts, like Plato's Meno, provide excellent material for beginning college students to consider in an inquiry into what it is to be human. In this paper, I will describe how I use them in a freshman seminar at Richard Stockton College.

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Number: 9.

Title of Paper Proposal: What's new in Herodotus?

Core text discussed: The History (Herodotus)

Date Submitted: 09/20/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Before he gives an account of the war between the Great King and the Greek cities, Herodotus presents a rich account of the peoples of the East. Is he an historian, an ethnographer, or anthropologist? Herodotus takes pleasure in human diversity, while seeming to prefer the ways of the Greeks. Can we learn something new from this mixture of breadth of appreciation and certainty of preference?

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Number: 8.

Title of Paper Proposal: Swann's Song: Marcel Proust in the Post-Modern World

Core text discussed: A La Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past)

Date Submitted: 09/12/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This essay will attempt to justify the presence of a long baroque novel in a Core Humanities course by citing the powerful evocation of childhood phenomena reconstructed over time. In addition, the essay will argue that's Proust's novel represents a bridge between the lavishness of baroque sentimentality and the often painful recognition of individuals who are outside the mainstream.

CONFERENCE PANEL PROPOSAL

Title of Panel: The Long, Great Novel in the Core Curriculum

Six Sentence Abstract of panel:
Can long complex novels like "War and Peace" be appropriated in Core courses? What will happen to Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dickens, Proust, and Dostoevsky if they are not studied in Core courses? Is it sacrilege to offer excerpts from these long works -- perhaps in on-line versions? What themes do these great novels articulate that are essential for liberal thinking?

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Number: 7.

Title of Paper Proposal: The Colonial Legacy of Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things

Core text discussed: Heart of Darkness

Date Submitted: 09/11/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Once a "classic text," Conrad's Heart of Darkness is vilified by many as a racist text, indicative of the worst of the West's colonial past. Nonetheless, Arundhati Roy, an avowed anti-Westerner, uses Conrad's work as a vantage point for her successful novel, The God of Small Things. The context moves from Africa to India, and the present time of the telling from the 19th to the 20th century. But for both authors, the concern for small and large, for surface and depth, become images for the problems of colonial realities, before and after nationalism, respectively. Roy's novel illustrates just how important Conrad's novella remains, establishing as it does the effects of early colonialism (although these are only hinted at in the earlier work).

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Number: 6.

Title of Paper Proposal: Tocqueville: Understanding the Influence of (or On) the Classical School of Economics

Core text discussed: Democracy in America

Date Submitted: 09/02/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Tocqueville is the focus of the development of the conference theme and it is only fitting to use his book "Democracy in America" as the basis for this paper. There is a debate among social scientists as to whether Tocqueville is best placed in Economics or Sociology and we will look at the core text as well as other of Tocqueville's to explore this issue. However, we will focus our attention on attempting to find information as to how Tocqueville either explained or critiqued the economic ideas of members of the Classical School of Economics whose writings were contemporaneous to his work.

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Number: 5.

Title of Paper Proposal: "Teaching the Life of Muhammad"

Core text discussed: Ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah (Life of the Prophet of God)

Date Submitted: 08/31/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Ibn Ishaq's is the earliest and most reliable biography of Muhammad, written some 125 years after Muhammad's death. It is essential reading for hose who wish to understand the Koran, the rise of Islam, and the central importance of Muhammad to the Islamic faith.

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Number: 4.

Title of Paper Proposal: Chaos, the Middle Voice, and Self Consciousness

Core text discussed: Hesiod's Theogony

Date Submitted: 08/28/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
In this paper, I explore the middle voiced birth of "Chaos" as a metaphor for human consciousness, using its root meaning as "gap" or "divide" to speak to the processes by which we organize our world. If we think of consciousness as a basic "space" of play, wherein ideas can be detached and reorganized, we can see the myth as speaking in terms of truth as Alethiea, or its root Legein, "to lay or to gather." This allows us to understand a Greek notion of truth, not as the simple correspondence of an idea to its object, but as an active process of organizing human experience. Further, it suggests that the reign's of the various "gods" spoke to a perception that our understanding of reality itself could be molded in different, often partially exclusive ways. Chaos, as a metaphor for this reorganization, can be seen to re-emerge when these temporal orders are overthrown. In this paper, I explore how the pattern of when Chaos emerges, and when it does not, speaks to the nature of these basic human experiences. Further, I explore how the middle voiced past tense of its birth makes sense both in terms of our basic self consciousness, opens up to a more creative notion of truth, and makes sense of the paradoxical passage wherein the Hesiod records that the sources and limits "of earth, sea, sky, and Tartaros are in Tartaros."

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Number: 3.

Title of Paper Proposal: Marcus Aurelius and the New Stoicism - A Philosophy for a World in Crisis?

Core text discussed: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Date Submitted: 08/28/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
Many of us live in abundance. Yet we still feel unhappy in a world that seems out of control. Stoicism, often portrayed as a cheerless philosophy, in actuality can offer psychological and spiritual insight into our contemporary lives. The strength of Stoicism resides in its reverence for that unique human capacity called reason. As experienced through the penetrating writings of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), the Stoic approach to life offers guidance on a multitude of issues ranging from climate change, to devotion to family and duty to country, to a near prophetic view of the natural world that aligns with modern physics.

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Number: 2.

Title of Paper Proposal: Critiquing Psychology via Philosophy

Core text discussed: Many

Date Submitted: 08/27/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
This paper will briefly examine the objectivity and limitations of psychology through the lenses of both the scientist and the philosopher. It will take a historical perspective, reading excerpts of classical works from Aristotle, Descartes, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Ryle, Kant & Leibnitz.

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Number: 1.

Title of Paper Proposal: Prince Hal, Model Prince

Core text discussed: Shakespeare's Henry V

Date Submitted: 08/27/2007

Four sentence abstract of paper:
The Henry IV/ Henry V plays present a splendid meditation on how Hal fashions himself to be the model Prince -- and from that, what it means to be English! And from that, according to Harold Bloom, what it means to be human!

Prince Hal is a wonderful figure for students; the bad boy who is really the best boy ever, an heroic emergence that inspires, and also a challenging self-portrayal that informs -- an integral self.

Not everybody thinks so, but they are wrong.