Humanities

Chair: Dr. Thomas W. Smith
Office: 304 St. Augustine Center
Tel. (610) 519-6165
Website: http://www.villanova.edu/artsci/humanities/

The Department of Humanities offers an integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum. This is available to Humanities majors as well as to students at Villanova University generally. In some cases, Humanities courses will fulfill certain requirements for the Core Curriculum of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

MAJOR: The Humanities major requires the completion of 10 courses. Four Gateway Courses are required of all majors which are: HUM 2001: God, HUM 2002: Human Person, HUM 2003: World, HUM 2004: Society (see course descriptions below). Students then take five free electives, two of which have to be taken within the Department of Humanities. Finally, in senior year Humanities majors take HUM 6500: Senior Capstone Seminar.

MINOR: Students must take two of the four Gateway Courses: HUM 2001, HUM 2002, HUM 2003, HUM 2004 plus three electives two of which must be take in the Humanities Department.


Gateway Courses
HUM 2001 THL: God - To talk about God is to talk about human beings and vice versa. Even atheism is a large statement about what it means to be human. This course will begin with some contemporary theological questions. What is religion, anyway. Do we need it anymore? What is the place of religion in the contemporary world? We will then investigate how revelation illuminates God and creation in a way that transforms the world. Fulfills an upper level Theology in the Core Curriculum.

HUM 2002 PHI: Human Person - What it means to be human has been called into question by a variety of movements that reduce human beings to, for instance, biological motivations, economic incentives, historical trends, or inescapable networks of power. These questions about what it means to be a human being come at a time in which technology gives us unprecedented power to manipulate human life. Beginning from these contemporary problems, we will go on to ask questions like: What is human nature? How does one become more deeply human? What does it mean to act for the human good? How can we discover meaning in primordial human experiences such as love, mortality, finitude, and suffering? What is human destiny? Fulfills an upper level Philosophy in the Core Curriculum.

HUM 2003 PHI: World - How we think about the natural world affects how we live and vice versa. Modern Science is a dominant way of interpreting the world and so human life. How does modern science interpret the world? What are the effects of this interpretation on the way we view human beings? What are the problems and possibilities in this interpretation? Are there any limits to modern science’s reductionism? How might these be overcome in order to disclose the full range of human experience? What is the relationship of science to philosophy and theology? Fulfills an upper level Philosophy in the Core Curriculum.

HUM 2004 PSC: Society - We live in a time when political, economic, and family life dominates our horizon of concerns. And yet we also live in a time when we seem cynical about the possibility of finding meaning in them. How is our dependant, rational nature developed in society through marriage, family, work, markets, and government? How can we engage these activities today in a way that is genuinely good for us? Fulfills an upper level Political Science in the Core Curriculum.


Capstone Seminar
Hum 6500: Senior Capstone Seminar
The Department’s Capstone is a seminar, meeting once a week, in which students read contemporary texts on issues they have engaged in their study of the humanities. A wide-ranging but not exhaustive list of these issues would include developments in biotechnology and their implications for our understanding of what it means to be a human being; the globalization of capitalism and its impact on work, culture, and politics; recent work in theology and philosophy and its meaning for inter-religious dialogue, ethical discussion, and public life; and challenges to postmodern theory which seek to critically incorporate its insights into the cultural construction of identity while affirming eternal truths about the human person. Students will be expected to contribute to class discussion, write weekly responses to texts, and complete a 10-15 page research paper.
 

See the website address above for more information.