Beginnings: Inquiring Into The Origins Of Politics, Poetry, And Mathematics

What are the origins of human society, language, and knowledge? Through classical works of history, philosophy, religion, mathematics, and poetry, we will explore the idea of the beginning. We encounter a range of classic “beginnings” in an effort to understand the diverse ways that they shape our experience of the world — from beginnings in time, such as political and religious foundings, to timeless beginnings, such as mathematical and philosophical first principles, to the creative and imaginative powers of poetry. Beginnings in a work of mathematics and in a work of religious narrative, for example, may connect in ways that we do not anticipate. Each text studied will stake out a different, often startling, approach to this fundamentally human concern with the origin of things.