Intellectual Traditions courses give students the opportunity to think in new ways about present-day issues through close encounters with the problems, values, and questions of the past.
Features of Intellectual Traditions
Intellectual Traditions classes are the center of the Honors College’s liberal arts curriculum, offering students from diverse majors a deeply engaged reading, writing, and conversation-rich environment for exploring and sharing ideas.
Intellectual Traditions courses examine important universal questions—questions that have existed across time and cultures - such as “What does it mean to be human?”, “Is there objective truth?”, “What does it mean to be part of a community?”, and “What is our proper relationship to the earth?” These expansive questions invite students from all majors to explore subjects of shared, ongoing concern. Through exploring these questions, students see both the common aspects of being human, and also how a diversity of experience illuminates and complicates any simple answers.
Students also learn what it means to think historically. To help students appreciate the diversity of human culture across time and instill a sense of historical consciousness, readings draw from ancient, medieval, and early modern sources.
Primary Texts
Intellectual Traditions courses promote students’ ability to engage directly with new ideas as scholars, rather than relying on analyses and interpretations from others. Students encounter an unfamiliar text or other object and are confronted with the challenge of arriving at – and attempting to answer - their own questions, rather than those presented by others. Through encountering texts and other historical artifacts directly, students strengthen their ability to engage with and appreciate ideas that may initially seem difficult or strange.
Discussion and Writing Intensive
Intellectual Traditions courses are conducted seminar style, with the strong expectation that all students participate in the class’s ongoing conversation. Students can do so in multiple ways, including large and small group discussions, formal debates, individual presentations, Reacting to the Past games, and virtual chats on Canvas. These opportunities to practice dialogue help develop openness to new perspectives, building confidence and collegiality.
Intellectual Traditions courses are writing-intensive as well. Students are required to use writing to further their thinking and understanding, employing critical analysis as a way of going beyond in-class discussions. Students learn how to ask and answer questions that are precise, debatable, significant, and answerable with the evidence at hand, and to express their thinking with clarity.
