The School of Human Inquiry · philosophy, history & belief
History of Science & Ideas
Where the big ideas came from: instruments, arguments, and the slow correction of error.
How a new way of asking questions rearranged the heavens and the earth beneath them.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~20 hours
Unit I — The Old Cosmos
Aristotle's physics · Ptolemy's heavens · Why the old system worked so well for so long
Unit II — The Heavens Rearranged
Copernicus proposes · Tycho's data, Kepler's ellipses · Galileo's telescope and Galileo's trial
Unit III — New Methods
Bacon and experiment · Descartes and mechanism · The Royal Society and witnessed proof
Unit IV — Newton's Synthesis
The Principia · Gravity as universal law · What the word 'revolution' leaves out: alchemy, craft, and the wider world
Where Darwin's idea came from, how it was tested, and how it was misused.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~16 hours
Unit I — Before Darwin
The fixity of species · Deep time from the rocks · Lamarck's attempt
Unit II — The Voyage and the Theory
The Beagle years · Natural selection, stated plainly · The long delay, and the Origin at last
Unit III — Reception and Rows
Reviews and caricatures · The eclipse of Darwinism · The modern synthesis
Unit IV — Uses and Abuses
Social Darwinism's error · Eugenics as cautionary history · Evolution in the courtroom
Medicine's slow education in what actually works, from four humors to randomized trials.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Ancient Arts
Hippocratic humors · Galen's long shadow · Healing in temple and home
Unit II — The Body Mapped
Vesalius and dissection · Harvey and circulation · The hospital is born
Unit III — The Germ Turn
Childbed fever and Semmelweis · Pasteur and Koch · Antisepsis and anesthesia
Unit IV — Modern Medicine
Antibiotics · The randomized trial · The genome and its promises
The eighteenth century's great argument about reason, rights, and religion — and its unfinished business.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Light from Where
The republic of letters · Salons and censors · The Encyclopédie
Unit II — Reason's Claims
Locke on mind and government · Voltaire's campaigns · Hume's doubts · Kant answers 'What is Enlightenment?'
Unit III — Counters and Costs
Rousseau against politeness · The Enlightenment and empire · Romanticism's rebuttal
Counting boards to code — the people and machines behind the device you are reading this on.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~14 hours
Unit I — Calculation Before Machines
Counting boards and abaci · Napier and logarithms · The human computers
Unit II — The Mechanical Dream
Babbage's engines · Ada Lovelace's notes · Hollerith and the census
Unit III — The Electronic Turn
Turing's abstract machine · Wartime codebreaking · ENIAC and the stored program
Unit IV — The Machine Comes Home
Transistors to microchips · Personal computing · The web, and a note on the present