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| Upper School Senior Seminar |
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CFS Upper School students apply for the interdisciplinary two-term course, “Senior Seminar,” at the end of their junior year, and those admitted receive a list of reading and film watching assignments over the summer with an initial writing assignment due as a reflection of the course's specific theme. The course is taught by two teachers with occasional guest speakers from the community. Students are required to compose a capstone paper, which is then defended before a panel (the two teachers, one other staff member and an individual of their choosing). Former Senior Seminar themes have included Inequality and Revolution, Good and Evil.
This year the Senior Seminar was structured around the following questions:
How do we determine conceptions of self and other? Is identity a social construct? How to conceptions of difference help us to construct a sense of sameness or self?
All of the readings have been focused around this idea. Students participated in an Oral Defense of their work to a group of four panelists as a capstone project of their thinking this year.
This year Senior Seminar students have read (partial list):
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Plato Symposium and Allegory of the Cave
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Blindness by Jose Saramago
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Despair by Vladimir Nabokov
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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
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Descartes Meditations (selections)
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Kant (introductions) Critique of Pure Reason and An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’
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Hegel The Unhappy Consciousness and Lordship and Bondage
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Kierkegaard (selections) That Despair is the Sickness unto Death
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Marx The Communist Manifesto and Capital (selections)
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Weber (selections) Bureaucracy
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Durkheim (selections) Rules of Sociological Method
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Dostoevsky The Grand Inquisitor
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Nietzsche (selections) Beyond Good and Evil
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Freud (selections) An Outline of Psychoanalysis
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James (selections) The One and the Many
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Heidegger (selections) The Principle of Identity
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Fanon (selections) Black Skin, White Masks
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Sartre (selections) Existentialism and Humanism
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Camus (chapter 1) The Rebel
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