This subject surveys main currents of European cultural and intellectual history in the modern period. Such a foundation course is central to the humanities in Europe. The curriculum introduces a set of ideas and arguments that have played a formative role in European cultural history, and acquaints them with some exemplars of critical thought. Among the topics to be considered: the critique of religion, the promise of independence, the advance of capitalism, the temptations of Marxism, the origins of totalitarianism, and the dialects of enlightenment. In addition to texts, we will also discuss pieces of art, incl. paintings and film.

9.63 teaches principles of experimental methods in human perception and cognition, including design and statistical analysis. The course combines lectures and hands-on experimental exercises and requires an independent experimental project. Some experience in programming is desirable. To foster improved writing and presentation skills in conducting and critiquing research in cognitive science, students are required to provide reports and give oral presentations of three team experiments. A fourth individually conducted experiment includes a proposal with revision, and concluding written and oral reports.

This course is a seminar in real-time language comprehension. It considers models of sentence and discourse comprehension from the linguistic, psychology, and artificial intelligence literature, including symbolic and connectionist models. Topics include ambiguity resolution and linguistic complexity; the use of lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, contextual and prosodic information in language comprehension; the relationship between the computational resources available in working memory and the language processing mechanism; and the psychological reality of linguistic representations.

This course will address some fundamental questions regarding human language: (1) how language is represented in our minds; (2) how language is acquired by children; (3) how language is processed by adults; (4) the relationship between language and thought; (5) exploring how language is represented and processed using brain imaging methods; and (6) computational modeling of human language acquisition and processing.

How do we decide whether an action is morally wrong? How do we choose to do what is right? When and why do we punish wrong-doers? Moral behavior and moral evaluation are functions of the human brain. It is just becoming possible to use neuroscientific methods to understand how they work. This course will consider the mechanisms of morality as a question for neuroscientists.

"Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

Do poems think? Recurrent images of the poet as an inspired lunatic, and of poetry as a fundamentally irrational art, have often fostered an understanding of poets and their work as generally extraneous to the work of the sciences. Yet poets have long reflected upon and have sought to embody in their work the most elementary processes of mind, and have frequently drawn for these representations on the very sciences to which they are thought to stand - and sometimes do genuinely stand - in opposition. Far from representing a mere departure from reason, then, the poem offers an image of the mind at work, an account of how minds work, a tool for eliciting thought in the reader or auditor. Bringing together readings in British poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with writings from the emergent sciences of psychology and the physiology of the brain, this interdisciplinary course will explore the ways in which British poets, in years that witnessed the crucial development of these sciences, sought to capture an image of the mind at work. The primary aim of the course is to examine how several prominent genres of British poetry - the lyric, for instance, and the didactic poem - draw from and engage in this period with accounts of cognition within the sciences of psychology, physiology, and medicine. More broadly, the course aims to give undergraduates with some prior experience in the methods and topics of literary study an introduction to interdisciplinary humanistic research.