Regis College, CCS 300H
Honors Sophomore Seminar: Chaos & Order

Syllabus (PDF format)
- with plagiarism exercise, paper instructions, & midterm instructions.

EReserves
1- Left click on the above link.
2 - Type " CCS 300H " in the open text box and left click "Search."
3 - Select one of the listed CCS 300H sections. (They're all the same.)
4 - Type the course password in the open text box and left click "Accept."

Aristotle (Power Point Show)
Aristotlelian Cosmo. (PDF)
Aristotle & Epicycles (outside link)
Kuhn Handout  (PDF)

Spectacle Quest. (PDF)

CCS 300H Grades
www.mygradebook.com

Dr. Ghedotti's Dogs
Bosco & Max

Other Links
Regis Honors Program
Core Studies
 

Honors Sophomore Seminar Description (Regis Bulletin): As the third course in a five-semester honors sequence, this course invites students to consider the human person in relation to both society and the natural world. Using a historically recursive approach, students investigate the scientific method and induction as modes of understanding our world. Prerequisite(s): CCS 200H and HO 250.

Course Goals: Science is often viewed as distinctly different from other academic ways of engaging with the world in its greater “objectivity” or consistency. However, individual, technological, and societal forces are significant in science as they are in other disciplines. This seminar endeavors to help students critically engage with the natural and social sciences as ways of knowing the world. Specifically:

·         Students should be able to critically evaluate the scientific way of knowing as practiced in the natural and social sciences. Students should be able to intelligently discuss the questions:

- What is science, especially as compared to other ways of knowing? (e.g., the role specific methods, the effect of individual perspectives, the status of applied and pure science, and the interplay between empiricism and theory)

- What does it mean “to know” in science? (e.g., reductionism and holism, the effect of the instrument, the ability of a human being to accurately study human phenomena)

- How do individual, group, and larger societal perspectives affect scientific understanding?

·         Students will demonstrate some ways in which changing conceptual models and methods of knowing have specifically resulted in changing understanding of cosmology (our place in the universe), the origin of the diversity of life (our place in the living world), and human behavior & culture (our self-conception and our place in society).

- Students will demonstrate the ability to differentiate between scholarly and popular writing, and incorporate scholarly research in constructive argumentative papers.    Students will demonstrate the ability to develop and complicate (i.e., “evolve”) a thesis based on analytic consideration of academic sources.

Class, Time and Place:

Monday & Wednesday 9:00-10:15am, Loyola 14

Instructors:

Dr. Karen Adkins
16 Loyola Hall, Phone: (303) 458-4024
Email: kadkins@regis.edu

Dr. Michael Ghedotti
225 Pomponio Science Center (Building), Phone: (303) 458-4091
Email: mghedott@regis.edu

Office Hours: ANNOUNCED IN CLASS. If I your instructor is not in her/his office he/she may be in the restroom or in another room in nearby. look around and give the instructor a few minutes.

REQUIRED COURSE MATERIALS:

Texts:

Flyvbjerg, B. 2001. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again. Cambridge.

Goodman, A. 2007. Intuition. Dial Press.

Gould, S. J. 1992 (reissue). The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections on Natural History. W. W. Norton & Co.

Horgan, J. 1996. The End of Science, Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Broadway.

Koestler, A. 1989. The Sleepwalkers, A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Penguin.

Rossenwasser, D. & J. Stephen. 2005. Writing Analytically, 4^th Edition. Heinle.

Sobel, D. 1995. Longitude, The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Penguin.

Reading on Reserve:
These sources are alrgely available for free as a printable PDF file through the Library's electronic reserves. 

Books may be purchased at the Regis University Bookstore in the Regis Student Center.