Shimer College - Academics - Curriculum - Core

Core

The core curriculum of Shimer College is a sequence of 16 required courses in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. The Basic Studies courses, numbered one and two, are generally taken during the first two years, and the Advanced Studies courses, numbered three and four, during the final two years. The Advanced Integrative Studies courses, numbered five and six, are taken in the senior year.

The humanities core begins with the study of visual art and music and progresses through literature, philosophy and theology. It culminates with the final course, "Critical Evaluation in the Humanities," which seeks to unify the Humanities courses by approaching all of the areas of the Humanities theoretically through critical evaluation of significant works of the 18th century and later. The course includes Martin Buber's I and Thou, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.

The social sciences sequence begins with study of the individual and society in the first course, proceeds to classical political thought in the second, then modern social and political theory in the third, and concludes with the "Theories of Social Inquiry" course, which focuses on statistical and interpretive methods in sociology, linguistic theory, and 20th century social thought, through works like Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia.

The natural sciences core studies science as it has developed historically, beginning with the presocratic philosophers of the 6th century BC and the theory of atoms in the first course; evolution, genetics, and animal behavior in the second; optics and the theory of relativity in the third; and concluding with the study of quantum physics and molecular biology. The natural science reading list includes Albert Einstein’s Relativity, Isaac Newton’s Opticks, Richard Feynman’s QED, Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry, and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

The first basic integrative studies course teaches the fundamental skills in close reading and argumentation required to work with original source texts. In the second course, logic and mathematics are studied in terms of the development of geometry and axiomatic systems in ancient and modern times. The advanced integrative studies courses, in which students explore connections between the course texts and those they have studied in other courses, are the capstone of the Shimer curriculum. The readings are arranged chronologically in a unified, full-year sequence to demonstrate their historical relationships, beginning with the ancient epic poems The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer's Iliad and concluding with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Reason in History.