Tagged: CC203

CC 203 screenshot

Reminder: All Core lectures are open to all members of the campus community, including alumni. Chalk credit: Prof. Tom Barfield

Candid shot: Barfield on Hobbes

Above, a snippet from Prof. Thomas Barfield’s very animated lecture (babba-bing!) on Thomas Hobbes, in September 2014 for the students of CC 203: Foundations of the Social Sciences.

Historical objectivity

Per the question of objectivity vs subjectivity in the reporting of history, relevant to cc203’s lecture on Thucydides’ “History”, check out this satirical piece by the Onion, titled World War II Documentary Suffused With Anti-Nazi Undertones. (courtesy alumna Jenna Dee)

Analects of the Core: Tocqueville on complacent legislators

Today’s analect relates to CC203’s study of the foundation of social sciences: Propitious circumstances and good laws might succeed in drawing to the legislature of a democratic people men very superior to those who are returned by the Americans to Congress ; but nothing will ever prevent the men of slender abilities who sit there […]

Analects of the Core: Darwin on the confidence of the ignorant

Today’s analect was inspired by Core alumni Tim Martinez (Core ’07-’09, CAS ’11) with reference to the study of Evolution and Society occurring in CC203, which Tim marks as one of his favorite courses he’s taken here at BU.  Since taking it, he’s maintained a strong interest in Sociology, but has persisted in his IR […]

Analects of the Core: Locke on the harm of intemperance

Relating to temperance, and the work of John Locke studied in CC203, here is today’s analect: For esteem and reputation being a sort of moral strength, whereby a man is enabled to do, as it were, by an augmented force, that which others, of equal natural parts and natural power, cannot do without it; he […]

Indiana Jones meets Malinowski

On Thursday November 29th, Professor Barfield will lecture to the students of CC203 about anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his ideas of exchange and reciprocity. Thinking about Malinowski’s continuing if too-little acknowledge impact on our society, we present this clip from The Young Indiana Jones. In it, our young protagonist is asking the elderly, wise ethnologist for […]

Analects of the Core: Engels on revolution

But the anti-authoritarians demand that the authoritarian political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the […]

Analects of the Core: Hobbes on the Good

From Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan: Aristotle and other heathen philosophers define good and evil by the appetite of men; and well enough, as long as we consider them governed every one by his own law. For int eh condition of me that have no other law but their own appetites, there can be no general rule […]

Analects of the Core: Hume on science and learning

The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstruction in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind. – David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding