General Information

Contact Information

Professor:: Abe Stone (abestone@ucsc.edu)
Office:: Cowell Annex A-106
Push notiﬁcation:: Notify Abe
Website:: https://people.ucsc.edu/~abestone/courses
Zoom class meeting:: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/95037324336?pwd=WTVML2tNaVlPaUExYUVXMjJ1YTVqUT09
Office hours:: Tuesday 2:00-3:00pm (in person)
Zoom office hours:: Mon. 10–11:00am; Tues. 2:00–3:00pm (or by appointment)
Zoom feed of lectures:: here

Course Description

We will read numerous texts written in the United States of America (plus one written in colonial America and one written in Canada), all of which deal, in one way or another, with the philosophical problems posed by America as a particular nation supposedly founded on universal principles.

Modality: In general, I will lecture in person in our assigned classroom, but I intend also to live-stream every lecture over Zoom. Due to the very inconvenient Jewish holiday schedule this year, however, there will also be four lectures via Zoom only: two at the regular class time (on Tuesday 4/11 and Thursday 5/25) and two at unusual times (on Monday 4/10 and Monday 4/17) (see the readings schedule below for further details). I will also make a recording of every lecture available on YouTube. Office hours will be via Zoom only.

Course Requirements

Two short essays, 2–3 pages each, due Tuesday, May 2, and Tuesday, May 30 (each worth 20% of the grade). (For the ﬁrst essay, there will be a choice of essay questions about the readings up through Thoreau, inclusive; for the second essay, a choice of essay questions about the readings from Royce through Dewey.) One ﬁnal paper, 4–6 pages, due Wednesday, June 14 (worth 60% of the grade).

Papers are due as an attachment via the “Assignments” tool on Canvas. The assignments will be available online and there will be links to them from the online version of this syllabus as well as from my main course page.

Please do not plagiarize. If you do and I catch you, you will receive no credit for the assignment and may fail the course, and you will also be subject to “disciplinary sanctions” from the University. (In contrast: if you hand in a paper consisting mostly of quotes from or paraphrases of other sources you have consulted, properly cited, you will not get a good grade — a good paper will contain your own interpretations and thoughts — but you will not fail, either.) If you have any questions about what plagiarism is or how to avoid it, you can ask me, or consult the resources listed on the Library website.[1]https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/citesources/plagiarism. For possible consequences of plagiarism, see the Academic Misconduct Policy.[2]https://www.ue.ucsc.edu/academic_misconduct.

Note that all assignments are due by 11:55pm on the due date.

You can ﬁnd answers to some commonly asked questions about my assignments and grading in my FAQ.

Attendance at lecture is strongly encouraged, but it is not a course requirement and I will not be taking attendance.

Texts

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me: (Random House, 2017) (ISBN: 978-0525510307).
Note there is online access to this text through the Library (see below for the course reserves link), but it is limited to three users at a time.
John Dewey, Individualism Old and New: (Prometheus, 1999) (ISBN: 978-1573926935).
An older edition is available on the Internet Archive.
George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism: (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) (ISBN: 978-0773530102).
Henry David Thoreau, Walden: (Dover, 1995) (ISBN: 978-0486284958).
The original edition is available on the Internet Archive and Wikisource, and there is also a Librivox recording.

The above texts can be ordered and/or purchased as e-books at the UCSC Bookstore (Akademos). All other reading for the course will be made available through Canvas or through free online resources. The texts I have ordered, as well as hard copy versions of almost all other readings, are on reserve at McHenry.

This document, and all other instructor-generated material in this course, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.