Instructor: Dr. Patrick Lee Miller
TR 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM | WASH 293B

This course examines controversies over free speech, religious liberty, democracy, and citizenship through contemporary cases, American founding documents, and primary texts from Western political thought. It will also trace these debates backward from modern America to ancient Greece, then apply historical and philosophical insights to contemporary civic disagreements through discussion and formal debate.

Instructor: Dr. Eric Hewett
MWF 8:30 AM - 9:20 AM | WASH 293E

This course examines Biblical figures as statesmen: political actors making choices in concrete situations. The course will examine those political situations, choices, and their political and practical impacts; what they reveal about character, virtues and vices; and the attitudes of the Biblical authors. Does the Bible offer a particular vision of statesmanship?

Instructor: Dr. Patrick Lee Miller
TR 10 AM - 11:15 AM | WASH 293C

This course examines Roman political history and its influence on the American founding. Students study republican statesmanship, mixed government, civil conflict, and the transition to monarchy through ancient texts and American constitutional debates. The course evaluates Polybius’s political philosophy and the strengths and limits of comparisons between the Roman Republic and the modern United States.

Instructor: Dr. Josiah Lippincott
TR 1 PM - 2:15 PM | WASH 393B

In this course, we will examine the nature and limits of high military command through the careers of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Nimitz, Douglas MacArthur, William Westmoreland, and David Petraeus. Classical and modern theories of generalship are tested against American practice, with attention to command failure, civilian authority, and commanders' responsibilities in a constitutional republic.

Instructor: Dr. Eric Hewett
MWF 1:30 PM - 2:20 PM | WASH 393A

This course examines major speeches from the history of Western civilization and competing criteria for greatness in a speech. The course considers speeches that exemplify rhetorical excellence and speeches that changed the course of history, and critically investigates tensions among eloquence, immediate political impact, and long-term influence.

Instructor: Dr. Dan Demetriou
W 4 PM - 6:50 PM | WASH 293A

This course develops students’ ability to analyze and discuss contemporary ethical controversies in forums such as the National Bioethics Bowl or International Business Ethics Case Competition. Students research cases, formulate and defend team positions, build presentations and slide decks, and respond to opposing analyses and judges’ questions. The course includes funded travel for selected students.

Instructor: Dr. Dan Demetriou
MWF 12:30 PM - 1:20 PM | WASH 393D

This course examines ethical questions arising in sex, courtship, marriage, reproduction, and family life. Topics include romantic love, consent and deception, mate choice and dating norms, sexual history, the nature and purposes of marriage, sexual obligations in relationships, divorce, natalism and antinatalism, reproductive choice, parenthood, and duties within families.

Instructor: Dr. Josiah Lippincott
TR 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM | WASH 393C

This course examines the relationship between technology and political authority through artificial intelligence. Students investigate consent, freedom of thought, technological resistance, and competing visions of the human future; compare proposals for AI governance; and evaluate how scientific development transforms domestic institutions, international competition, and the exercise of sovereign power.

Instructor: Dr. Dan Demetriou
TR 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM | HONR 293G

This course examines competing accounts of nations and their moral rights and duties concerning migration. The course distinguishes nations from states, citizenries, ethnic groups, and cultures and considers arguments for and against patriotism, nationalism, border restrictions, and cultural or ethnic continuity. Further topics include the ethics of remigration and the implications of migration ethics for decolonization movements.

Instructor: Dr. Eric Hewett
W 9:30 AM - 10:20 AM | HONR 293L

We will read the masterwork of the great Roman poet Virgil, the Aeneid, in English translation. We will focus on appreciating the inherent beauty, power, and literary value of the poem itself, while also considering its place in literary history—both the Greek and Roman sources that influenced it and its influence on later authors—and its political significance in Augustan Rome.

Instructor: Dr. Josiah Lippincott
M 1:30 PM - 2:20 PM | HONR 293P

Heroes and monsters. Rise and fall. Death and dragons. Beowulf offers a revealing glimpse into the pre-modern European spirit and into the human condition as such. Here both pagan and Christian impulses reveal themselves. This course will examine this fruitful encounter, focusing on what Beowulf can tell us about the place of the heroic in the Christian and modern world.

Instructor: Dr. Patrick Lee Miller
W 10:30 AM - 11:20 AM | HONR 293N

The book is so much better than the movie. Read it with an expert on ancient Greece to see why. We’ll consider all of its many tales and how they fit together into one story about growing up and coming home that is fundamental to our civilization.

Instructor: Dr. Patrick Lee Miller
MWF 11:30 AM – 12:20 PM | WASH 293L

Is there a human nature? Or is there no such thing, but instead only the artificial construction of "human nature" according to each society? Evolutionary theory, and evolutionary psychology in particular, argues that there is something natural to who we are. Billions of years of natural selection, and especially sexual selection, have shaped not only our bodies but our ways of desiring, feeling, and thinking.

This course begins by dismantling the myth of the "blank slate" that informs so much of our default thinking nowadays about human nature. Our political life—which encompasses our universities and how they pursue knowledge—is founded on this myth, so the course frames its study of evolutionary psychology as a political question: what should the statesman learn from evolutionary theory about who we are and how we should live together? In order to answer this question, the course turns to the basics of evolutionary theory, ensuring that students understand evolutionary arguments from first principles. Then it turns to specific theses of evolutionary psychologists: that aggression and altruism have specific evolutionary roles, that the two sexes are different by nature, that our minds have been shaped by the ancient pressure to find mates, and that our behaviors towards kin and nation are intelligible according to evolutionary arguments.

The course will not only introduce students to these arguments, but teach them how to evaluate them. Ultimately, the goal of the course is to assess how (if at all) evolutionary psychology helps us better understand human life, especially its political dimensions.

Instructor: Dr. Philip Michelbach
TR 1:00 PM – 2:15 PM | WASH 293N/POLS 371

This course is an introduction to modern political thought in the West. The course is taught as a historical and thematic narrative. In the first part of the course, we examine the conditions and features of modern politics by focusing on the post-medieval separation of religion and politics. In the second section we will consider attempts to find a new foundation for politics, and in particular for the nation state, from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

Instructors: Dr. Josiah Lippincott and Dr. Dan Demetriou
MWF 9:30 AM – 10:20 AM | WASH 393A

This seminar examines the intellectual and political currents commonly called the New Right. It begins with the postwar conservative consensus and fusionism. It then examines major and emerging strands of rightist thought, including vitalism/Nietzscheanism, integralism, postliberalism, neoreaction, nationalist populism, and ethnonationalism. The aims are to (1) understand these movements, (2) critically evaluate them, and (3) provide students with an opportunity to develop and defend their own philosophical and policy views on the contested issues these movements seek to address.

Instructor: Dr. Patrick Lee Miller
Thursday 1:00 PM – 1:50 PM | WASH 293U/HONR 293V

We will read and discuss Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. Like this biography, our focus will be on Washington the man, the general, and the statesman. Along the way we will discuss general questions raised by his life: What is virtue? What is statesmanship? What is America?