We are friends and colleagues who have collaborated on developing the following course at Houston Community College (HCC). We are also both philosophers. While the course featured here is not housed in our Philosophy Department and does not belong solely to one discipline, the way we each teach it is informed by our philosophical training and backgrounds. In 2024, along with Drs. Joanna Fax (English), Melinda Mejia (World Languages & Humanities), and Nathan Smith (Philosophy), we received a three-year implementation grant from the Teagle Foundation’s Cornerstone: Learning for Living program to promote the liberal arts at our community college by developing and promoting discussion-based courses centered around transformative texts. Ever since the two of us received a planning grant from Teagle in 2023, we have been working to develop and promote the courses in this program, now called Human Horizons. This effort takes place across our gateway course described below, HUMA 1301 Intro to the Humanities as tagged with the new Human Horizons designation, as well as other general education courses throughout HCC. Below, we each describe our respective versions of HUMA 1301. This course is not purely “philosophical” in the narrow professional sense. However, the liberal education program that animates the course is one expression of the “love of wisdom” that is an issue in philosophy. The humanities, as we conceive and practice them, issue philosophical truths to which our students may gain access.
Jacob Mills:
In this work, I was very much inspired by my experience at my undergraduate institution, St. John’s College, a small liberal arts college focusing on the “great books” located in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. I remember being fascinated and transfixed during my first year as we read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid. The small classes (eighteen or so students), sitting around a solid wood table discussing ideas, the Santa Fe fall out the window, all the while addressing each other as “Mr. X” and “Mrs. Y,” were unlike any other thing I had experienced up to that point. I was sold—hook, line, and sinker.
For my HUMA 1301 Intro to the Humanities: Human Horizons course, we start off reading a healthy number of selections from Homer’s Iliad. After that, we move on to Book 1 of Euclid’s Elements. Next, we move into selections from the Federalist Papers, and finally, we finish with the Analects of Confucius. The goal here is to give students a taste of what the humanities can be by seeing a range of what humans have done, through epic poems, math, civics, and philosophy.
For assignments, I focus pretty exclusively on paper writing. We all know the key to better writing is to read good writing and it is my hope that students’ experience with these texts has that effect. I try to keep papers short, approximately two pages double spaced, so that writing becomes an exercise in the economy—every sentence doing work. We start by trying to come up with interesting questions, with the idea being that a good thesis is simply an answer to an interesting question. We proceed from there to the construction of a thesis, identifying textual evidence, and finally thinking about how what they are saying is interesting and related to how we understand what the text has to reveal to us. We do much of this through in-class peer review workshops.
One thing that often comes up is skepticism about the ability to effectively run discussion-based seminar-style classes at a community college. One thing I do to address this is spatial, and I learned this from my time at St. John’s. I make sure I have classrooms with modular seating so that we can rearrange the tables so that we are all facing each other, rather than the students all facing the instructor at the front of the class. I have found that this makes an enormous difference psychologically in getting students to realize that their learning is in their own hands and opens them up to the experience of a good conversation. The other thing I do is come up with Discussion Questions ahead of time, which I post on Canvas. Their job is to come to class having answered at least one Discussion Question; that way, they all have something to talk about. I also require them to answer another Discussion Question after class in light of the conversation.
My experience teaching these Human Horizons-style courses has been nothing short of transformative. I have seen students go from timid and shy to bold and assertive, proudly expressing profound thoughts about perennial questions concerning our shared human condition.
David Liakos:
My syllabus for HUMA 1301 Intro to the Humanities: Human Horizons is oriented toward three goals:
- To show my students what is distinctive about the humanities as opposed to other forms of academic knowledge and other aspects of society;
- To acquaint my students with selected moments from the history of “Western” art and literature and to get them to see themselves in light of these moments;
- To teach these goals from the methodological perspective of phenomenology, which I think is the best framework for studying the humanities.
My current version of this course begins with two readings that address the first goal. We read excerpts from Cicero’s speech Pro Archia, in which he offers a concise definition of the “liberal arts.” The text is also emotionally resonant since Cicero’s defense of the value of poetry takes place in the context of his advocacy for his mentor, who was threatened with deportation from Rome because of a dispute concerning his status as a citizen. We turn next to a text by Petrarch, whose rediscovery of Cicero’s letters inaugurated Renaissance “humanism.” In The Ascent of Mount Ventoux, Petrarch describes opening a copy of Augustine’s Confessions during a mountain hike: “I believed that what I had read there was written for me and no one else.” Finding oneself addressed by a text from a radically different time and place is the paradigm of the humanities. We also talk about how Petrarch’s encounter with Augustine is the ancestor of pop culture memes that consist of screenshots with captions that are variations on the phrase “this is me.” The liberal arts, “written for me and no one else,” “this is me”—these are the distinctive terms of the humanities, how they address first-person meaning as opposed to third-person facts discovered by the social and natural sciences and that provide the unquestioned framework of contemporary life.
In terms of acquainting my students with moments from Western history, the rest of the course readings are meant to address this goal. We read excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey, all of the Gospel of John, cantos from Dante’s Inferno, recent and contemporary African American poetry by Audre Lorde, Ishmael Reed, and Terrance Hayes, and (time permitting) visual art and music referencing these texts. The goal is not to impose “classics” upon students because of their “importance,” “greatness,” and so on. Instead, taking our cue from Petrarch, we find how these texts speak to (which includes differing from or challenging) students’ aspirations, concerns, and anxieties.
The warrant of a text’s claim to meaning is its transformative effect on the reader, that is, the way readers find themselves addressed by the text. All these goals are realized in the discussion, where I provide an outline of the text and initial thoughts about significant passages, opening up freewheeling and improvisational conversations, which are continued in online discussion forums.
Themes from these discussions provide the basis for prompts on two in-person essay exams. In an Interpretive Paper, students connect concepts or themes from one course reading to an artwork from any medium of their choosing. Students formulate an interpretive thesis in which they connect the reading to some object that has mattered to them in their own lives.
Regarding the third goal, I have a word about how I approach this course as a philosopher. As befits an interdisciplinary course, HUMA 1301 admits to multiple disciplinary, methodological, and intellectual points of entry. My approach, grounded in my research, is that phenomenology provides the best framework for conceptualizing the meaning of an issue in the humanities. Taking something “as” something requires a first-person disclosure of the significance of texts and artworks in which my own being is at stake.
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Jacob Mills
Jacob Mills received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rice University in 2014. He teaches in the Philosophy Department at Houston Community College. His research interests move around History of Early Modern Philosophy, Plato, and Logic. His courses include Intro to Philosophy, Symbolic Logic, Classical Philosophy, and Intro to the Humanities.
David Liakos
David Liakos is a full-time philosophy faculty member at Houston Community College. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. He is co-principal investigator of a Teagle Foundation grant to implement a humanities curriculum based in “transformative texts” at HCC. His research is grounded in hermeneutics and phenomenology.
