Classical Liberal Arts

This course will explore the field of macroeconomics, looking at the economy as a whole, including issues such as employment, inflation, and national production.

This course will explore the field of microeconomics, looking at the economy primarily through the lens of the individual decision-maker. It will explore topics related to elasticity of demand, marginal utility, and elasticity of supply among others.

This course will provide students with a baseline understanding of how to conduct themselves in an academic environment, develop critical thinking, engage in civil discourse, and prepare themselves to be challenged by difficult and even troublesome ideas, while thinking for themselves.

This course explores the various civilizations of the world from their origin to the late Middle Ages, looking at them in isolation and as they interact with one another. Students are asked to consider the advantages and disadvantages of various ways of organizing human life in both space and time.

This course continues the exploration begun in World Civilizations I. Topics in this course examine the civilization structures from the early Modern period up to and including the present.

This course explores the origins of Western Civilization in the tension between Athens (philosophy/reason) and Jerusalem (religion/faith) in the unrolling of Western culture and society through the Renaissance. Special attention is given to the role of the individual, rights, liberties, and duties and their tension with forces of centralization and concentrated power structures.

This course continues the exploration from Western Civilization I. It begins with the examination of the culture and society after the Renaissance and Reformation and follows those influences, as well as later concepts in social civics, up to and including the present.

This course will explore questions related to how the imaginative arts influence our own self-understanding. This will be done through the careful study of selected historical works of literature, art, and music.

This course is an extension of Topics in Literature I. Reading and discussion of contemporary influential works lead to questions related to how the arts influence our own self-understanding. Topics may include works in traditional mediums as well as film and newer forms of media.

This course focuses on the writing of a thesis paper on a topic drawn from student's coursework, focusing on a single work, or a theme connecting several different works.

This course looks at economic concepts from the perspective of the nation state and governmental influence through Law and policy. Emphasis is placed on the way in which government interacts with the economy and on how those interactions effect entrepreneurship.

A survey of the philosophical, political, and economic approaches to understanding how social institutions work and how they should work. Topical focus varies, but may include economic justice, the economics and ethics of wealth creation, markets and morality, or democratic theory.

This course will teach students to apply the distinctive methods of the three disciplines to challenging questions in social and political philosophy, including formal analysis in economics and political science and logical and normative evaluation in philosophy. As with other PPEL core courses, the focus is on the integration of the methods from the different disciplines.

This course explores the paradigms in which we place history through the ideas and writings of seminal thinkers and exemplary works from each period. Students are asked to suspend their current perspectives in order to understand how people in the past viewed the world, and then travel through the transitions to new ways of thinking.

This course looks at various religious and non-religious ways of framing our understanding of the world, including animist and pagan traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, as well as various atheist traditions. Students are asked first to identify key aspects of difference religious perspectives, and then to evaluate them in relation to each other, while exploring the role that religion plays in human life.

An introduction to some contemporary moral issues. Topics may, for example, include animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, sexual morality, genetic engineering, and questions of welfare and social justice.

This course explores the role of science in society with an emphasis on how science informs our understanding of ourselves and the world. Students will learn about science through the Newtonian Age. This class will have a lab component.

This course looks first at the way in which the physical features of the planet affect its local potentialities, before looking at how those potentialities affect the way in which humans gather and interact with the environment.

This course explores the way in which humans’ ability to use tools has changed not only their way of living, but the planet as a whole. Students will be asked to consider whether technology only advances in a positive direction, or also can have negative effects, as well as the future of technology and how it might affect life as we know it.

This course explores the way in which the physical environment changes over time and how humans have and will continue to influence the planet as a whole. Students will also explore the changing way in which we view the environment, and its role in our overall value systems.