COURSE SYLLABUS

I. Title: Curiosity: Ancient and Modern Thinking about Thinking

II. Instructors: Prof. Danielle S. Bassett & Prof. Peter T. Struck

Danielle S. Bassett is the Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor in the
Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She is most well known for her
work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition
and disease in human brain networks. She is currently writing a book for MIT Press entitled
Curious Minds, with co-author Perry Zurn Professor of Philosophy at American University. She
received a B.S. in physics from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University
of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a
postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center
for the Study of the Mind. She has received multiple prestigious awards, including American
Psychological Association's ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow (2014),
MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE
Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Harvard Higher Education Leader (2015),
Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER
(2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science
(2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018). She is the author of more than 180 peer-
reviewed publications, which have garnered over 13000 citations, as well as numerous book
chapters and teaching materials. She is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization
Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network
science and the visual arts. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation,
the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the
Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John
D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and
the University of Pennsylvania.

Peter T. Struck is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program and founder of its
Integrated Studies curriculum. He is cofounder (with Sarah Igo) of the National Forum on the
Future of Liberal Education, and has worked with foundations, media organizations, and
scholarly societies to promote the liberal arts. He works on the intellectual history of Greek and
Roman antiquity. His book Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts
(Princeton 2004) won the C. J. Goodwin Award from the American Philological Association for
best book in Classical Studies. His most recent book is Divination and Human Nature: A
Cognitive History of Intuition in Antiquity, (Princeton 2016), for which he also won the
Goodwin Award, becoming the first person to win the award twice. He edited Mantikê (with
Sarah Iles Johnston, Brill 2006), the Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Rita Copeland,
Cambridge 2010), and is general editor (with Sophia Rosenfeld) of the six-volume Cultural
History of Ideas forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2020. He is currently writing a
popular book on mythology for Princeton University Press. He has given dozens of lectures at
universities in the United States and Europe, and has held fellowships from the National
Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the
Mellon Foundation, the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the
American Academy in Rome. He has won multiple teaching awards at Penn, including the
Lindback Award, the university's top teaching prize.

The professors can be reached by email at dsb@seas.upenn.edu and struck@sas.upenn.edu,

respectively.

III. Time & Place:

Lectures, discussion, and activities will occur Tuesday 1:30pm-4:30pm (EAS 244, CLST 344,
INTG 344).

Bassett’s office hours will be held 10am-11am on Tuesdays.

Struck’s office hours will be held noon-2pm on Thursdays.

IV. Scope: The course examines two approaches to the still unanswered question of what
happens when humans create knowledge. How should we describe the impulse, or set of
impulses, that leads us to seek it? What is happening when we achieve it? And how do we
describe the new state in which we find ourselves after we have it? We will study the work of
contemporary physicists and cognitive scientists on these questions along side the approaches
developed by the two most powerful thinkers from antiquity on the topic, Plato and Aristotle.
The course will begin with Plato on knowledge, followed by an introduction to tools from
network science and statistical physics that can be used to evaluate the structure of knowledge,
the acquisition of knowledge, and the generation of new knowledge. The second portion of the
course will focus on Aristotle’s thoughts on wonder, teleology in nature, gradients of the mind,
and related topics, followed by an introduction to theories and tools from network neuroscience
and cognitive science on the practice of curiosity. The goal of the course is to provide students
with the conceptual tools to consider what curiosity is, what its value is, what its dangers are,
how it can be quantified, and how to measure it in their own writing and that of historical
thinkers. What makes a good idea? What drives innovation? How can we foster it?

V. Texts.

Ancient Texts: Ackrill, ed., New Aristotle Reader (Princeton); Reeve, ed., A Plato Reader
(Hackett); and, as a guide to Aristotle, Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand
(Cambridge).
Modern Texts: We will be reading primary scientific literature in the form of research articles,
which are available online from any computer on the Penn network. Other relevant papers or
books that may be of interest for future reading are noted in the section entitled Detailed Weekly
Schedule.

General Reading: If you are generally interested in interdisciplinary accounts of curiosity you
might enjoy Curiosity Studies: Toward a New Ecology of Knowledge, edited by Perry Zurn &
Arjun Shankar, Minnesota Press, To Appear (2018). You might also consider perusing a few
more circumscribed collections which, while interdisciplinary, nevertheless focus more directly
on field hubs relevant to their topics: e.g. La Curiosité; Vestiges du savoir, edited by Nicole
Czechowski (Paris: Autrement, 1993), Curiosité et Libido sciendi de la Renaissance aux
Lumières, eds. Jacques-Chaquin and Sophie Houdard (Paris: ENS Editions, 1998), Women and
Curiosity in Early Modern England, eds. Line Cottegnies, Sandrine Parageau, and John J.
Thompson (Boston: Brill, 2016), The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, eds. Ilhan Inan, Lani
Watson, Dennis Whitcomb, and Safiye Yigit (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), and The
New Science of Curiosity, ed. Goren Gordon (New York: Nova Publishers, 2018).

Conference This Semester: You might also be interested in an interdisciplinary conference on

the topic to be held at Penn: "Curiosity: Emerging Sciences and Educational Innovations,"
December 7-8, 2018. Held in the Glandt forum. Confirmed speakers include: Danielle S. Bassett
(University of Pennsylvania), Elizabeth Bonawitz (University of California, Berkeley), Goren
Gordon (Tel Aviv University), Ilhan Inan (Bogazici University), Jackie Gottlieb (Columbia
University), Matthias Gruber (Cardiff University), Edith Law (University of Waterloo), Pierre-
Yves Oudeyer (INRIA), Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (University of New Hampshire), Philipp
Schmit (MIT Media Lab), Arjun Shankar (Hamilton College), Elliot Smith (Warwick
University), Robert Wilson (University of Arizona), and Perry Zurn (American University).

VI. Weekly Schedule

Week Date Instructor Topic Notes

1 28-Aug DB & PS Introduction to the course
2 4-Sep PS Plato on where knowledge comes from
3 11-Sep PS Plato on what’s knowable
4 18-Sep PS Plato on the urge to know and where it Paper 1 due
leads
5 25-Sep DB Curiosity: Information seeking Measure Curiosity

PZ Guest Lecture by Prof. Perry Zurn

6 2-Oct DB Knowledge and semantic networks Concept Mapping
7 9-Oct DB Analyzing semantic networks Analyze Meno
8 16-Oct DB & PS Lab day Analyze Student
Paper; Compare
with Meno
9 23-Oct PS Aristotle Basics: form, cause, substance
10 30-Oct DB Curiosity as knowledge network building Concept Mapping
Lab Report 1 Due
11 6-Nov DB & PS Knowledge gaps. Aristotle’s soul
12 13-Nov DB & PS Network learning. Aristotle’s aware soul
--- 20-Nov No class ----------------------------------------------------
13 27-Nov DB & PS Brain network architecture. Aristotle’s Paper 2 due
knowing soul and the impulse to know
14 4-Dec DB & PS Lab day Analyze the two
concept maps
15 11-Dec ------------- Reading Days
16 18-Dec ------------- Final Report Due at midnight Lab Report 2 Due

VII. Detailed Weekly Schedule (Subject to change based on in-class discussion)

In this section, we provide a bit more detail on the general theme of each lecture, the reading
assignment to be completed before the lecture, and any other assignments that are due that week.

Week 1 (August 28, 2018) Introduction to the Course.

Led by: Bassett and Struck.
General theme of the class: In this first class, we will briefly discuss the syllabus, provide
an overview of the course, and outline the big open questions in ancient and
modern thinking about thinking.
Read before class: Jonathan Swift, “A Full and True Account of the Battle fought last
Friday, between the Ancient and the Modern books in St. James's Library,” which
can be found here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_the_Books;
AND
Lear, chap. 1.
AND
Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Assignment due: None

Week 2 (September 4, 2018) Plato on Where Knowledge Comes From

Led by: Struck.
General theme of the class: In this class we will set out basic concepts for understanding
Plato’s ideas on knowledge and curiosity. We will start with a section of Plato’s
Meno – as always, please have the assigned text read carefully before class. The
dialogue centers on the question of what is “virtue” (a better translation is
“excellence”). This will get us started on Plato’s Forms, the question of what real
knowledge is knowledge of, and the place of mathematics in knowledge.
Read before class: Plato, Meno, 70a-86d
Assignment due: None.
Note: Prof. Bassett is away for this class, speaking at “Schrodinger at 75: The Future of
Biology” https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife/
Week 3 (September 11, 2018) Plato on What’s Knowable
Led by: Struck.
General theme of the class: Here we will concentrate on two sections of Plato’s Phaedo.
It’s recommended that you read the whole thing, but not required. This text will
help us sharpen ideas about knowledge and curiosity by introducing the
soteriological dimension to the kind of thinking that leads to real knowledge.
Read before class: Plato, Phaedo 72e-84b, 95b-106a
Assignment due night before class: The night before class, pick the most puzzling
outstanding issue from the reading for this week and last week, formulate it as a
question, and post it to Canvas’ discussion area – and remember, conciseness is a
mark of genius.

Week 4 (September 18, 2018) Plato on the Urge to Know and Where it Leads
Led by: Struck.
General theme of the class: This week we will work to understand where Plato thinks
knowledge can lead us. It will also allow us to see how deeply ideas of
knowledge are embedded in questions of ontology – surely for Plato, and
probably for anyone.
Read before class: Republic, 473d (middle of book 5) – 521d (middle of book 7)
Assignment due: First paper due on Sunday Sept. 23, midnight. See below “Explanation
of Assignments.”

Week 5 (September 25, 2018) Curiosity: Information Seeking.

Led by: Bassett, with guest lecture by Prof. Perry Zurn, Dept. of Philosophy, American
University
General theme of the class: Contemporary science (cognitive science, neuroscience,
psychology, clinical science) generally defines curiosity as information seeking.
In this class, we will discuss how information seeking is defined, how it is
measured, and current theories of how it is driven by underlying
neurophysiological processes in the brain.
Read before class: Kidd C, Hayden BY. The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.
Neuron. 2015 Nov 4;88(3):449-60. Available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26539887
AND
Litman JA, Spielberger CD. Measuring epistemic curiosity and its diversive and
specific components. J Pers Assess. 2003 Feb;80(1):75-86. Available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12584070
Assignment due: None.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy other work from Prof. Celete Kidd (Rutgers), Prof.
Jacqueline Gottlieb (Columbia) and Dr. Jordan Litman (Institute for Human and
Machine Cognition).
Week 6 (October 2, 2018) Knowledge and Semantic Networks.
Led by: Bassett.
General theme of the class: Disconnected bits of information are useless. Knowledge is
inherently relational; bits of information are connected to one another by notions
of similarity in form or function, causality, dependency, or other relations. In this
class we will discuss knowledge networks, their existence, their architecture, and
their importance.
Read before class: Bales ME, Johnson SB. Graph theoretic modeling of large-scale
semantic networks. J Biomed Inform. 2006 Aug;39(4):451-64. Available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16442849
AND
Henrique F. de Arruda, Luciano da F. Costa, Diego R. Amancio. Classifying
informative and imaginative prose using complex networks. Europhysics Letters
(EPL) 113 (2016) 28007. Available here:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1209/0295-5075/113/28007/meta
Assignment due: None.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Prof. David Danks (Carnegie Melon, Department of
Philosophy), “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical
Models” from MIT Press. You might also enjoy Peter Gärdenfors “The Geometry
of Meaning” also from MIT Press, as well as Doignon & Falmagne, “Knowledge
Spaces” from Springer.

Week 7 (October 9, 2018) Analyzing Semantic Networks.

Led by: Bassett.
General theme of the class: In this class, we will discuss mathematical concepts related to
the architecture of networks, statistical quantities that can assess that architecture,
and computational tools to estimate the statistical quantities. We will then apply
these ideas to a semantic network extracted from Plato’s Meno.
Read before class: Luciano da F. Costa, Francisco A. Rodrigues, Gonzalo Travieso, P. R.
Villas Boas. Characterization of Complex Networks: A Survey of measurements.
Advances in Physics, Volume 56, pages 167 - 242, Issue 1 (2007). Available
here: https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0505185
Assignment due: None.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Prof. Mark Newman’s “Network Science: An
Introduction” (2010) Oxford University Press, as well as Réka Albert and Albert-
László Barabási. Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Rev. Mod. Phys.
74:47. Available here:
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.74.47

Week 8 (October 16, 2018) Architecture of Ancient and Modern Thought.

Led by: Bassett & Struck.
General theme of the class: In this class, we will begin with a discussion of the assigned
reading, and then quickly turn to a comparative analysis between the network
 architecture of student papers and the network architecture Plato on the same
topics.
Read before class: Mota et al. (2016) The ontogeny of discourse structure mimics the
development of literature. Available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.09268
Assignment due: None. In-class project instead.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Mota NB, Copelli M, Ribeiro S. Thought disorder
measured as random speech structure classifies negative symptoms and
schizophrenia diagnosis 6 months in advance. NPJ Schizophr. 2017 Apr 13;3:18.
doi: 10.1038/s41537-017-0019-3. AND Palaniyappan L, Mota NB, Oowise S,
Balain V, Copelli M, Ribeiro S, Liddle PF. Speech structure links the neural and
socio-behavioural correlates of psychotic disorders. Prog Neuropsychopharmacol
Biol Psychiatry. 2018 Jul 11;88:112-120.

Week 9 (October 23, 2018) Aristotle Basics: Form, Cause, Substance

Led by: Struck.
General theme of the class: As was the case with Plato, Aristotle’s world works
differently from ours. We will spend this week getting to know some fundamental
Aristotelian ideas that are prerequisites for us to understand what he thinks of
knowledge and curiosity. NB: Whereas Plato tends to work from the top down,
Aristotle is bottom up thinker. He is fascinated by the material world and uses
empirical observation to understand it. Also NB: Aristotle is hard to read.
Perhaps the hardest aspect of reading him is to get past his seeming simplicity.
Take your time. Count on about five pages an hour. Use Lear as a guide
(required).
Read before class: Physics 2.1-9; AND Lear, chap. 2.
Assignment due: None.

Week 10 (October 30, 2018) Curiosity as Knowledge Network Building.

Led by: Bassett.
General theme of the class: In this class, Prof. Bassett will posit the theory that curiosity
can be formalized as a practice of knowledge network building.
Read before class: Perry Zurn, Danielle S. Bassett. On curiosity: a fundamental aspect of
personality, a practice of network growth. Personality Neuroscience, In Press.
Available here: https://www.danisbassett.com/research-projects.html
Assignment due: Lab Report 1 Due. Bring previous concept mapping network to class.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Iacopini I, Milojević S, Latora V. Network
Dynamics of Innovation Processes. Phys Rev Lett. 2018 Jan 26;120(4):048301.
Available here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29437427

Week 11 (November 6, 2018) Knowledge Gaps. Aristotle’s Soul.

Led by: Bassett and Struck
General theme of the class: In this class, Prof. Bassett and Prof. Struck will each take
about an hour of the session to advance their separate lines of thinking, leaving
some time at the end for cross talk. Prof. Bassett will be discussing evidence for
 the existence of knowledge gaps during the learning process, and their potential
relevance for curiosity and the mind. This week on Aristotle we will talk about his
locus of cognition, the Greek psychê, which is customarily rendered in English as
“soul.” We’ll discuss how Aristotle conceives of Soul not as theological
category, but as ontological one. We’ll work to understand what this means: Soul
is the form of living matter.
Read before class: Sizemore et al. (2018) Knowledge gaps in the early growth of
semantic networks. Nature Human Behavior, In press. Available here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00133
AND
Aristotle, On the Soul, selections, book 1, in Ackrill, book 2.1-4; AND Lear, 4.1
Assignment due: None.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Computer-Assisted Learning Based on Cumulative
Vocabularies, Conceptual Networks and Wikipedia Linkage by Lauri Lahti.
Available here:
https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/15445/isbn9789526061641.pdf?seq
uence=1
AND
Ann E. Sizemore, Jennifer Phillips-Cremins, Robert Ghrist, Danielle S. Bassett.
The importance of the whole: topological data analysis for the network
neuroscientist. Network Neuroscience, In Review (2018). Available here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05167

Week 12 (November 13, 2018) Network Learning. Aristotle’s Aware Soul.

Led by: Bassett and Struck
General theme of the class: In this class, Prof. Bassett and Prof. Struck will each take
about an hour of the session to advance their separate lines of thinking, leaving
some time at the end for cross talk. Prof. Bassett will be discussing the
construction of laboratory experiments to measure network learning. This will be
perception week on Aristotle. We will work to understand how the mind
perceives the world. It will deepen our ideas of a hierarchy of soul capacities, at
the top of which sits thinking.
Read before class: Karuza EA, Thompson-Schill SL, Bassett DS. Local Patterns to
Global Architectures: Influences of Network Topology on Human Learning.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2016 Aug;20(8):629-640. Available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27373349
AND
Ari E. Kahn, Elisabeth A. Karuza, Jean M. Vettel, Danielle S. Bassett. Network
constraints on learnability of probabilistic motor sequences. 2018. Nature Human
Behavior, In Revision. Available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.03000
AND
Aristotle, On the Soul, book 2.5-12, book 3.1-2; AND Lear, 4.2
Assignment due: None.
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy
 Karuza EA, Kahn AE, Thompson-Schill SL, Bassett DS. Process reveals
structure: How a network is traversed mediates expectations about its architecture.
Sci Rep. 2017 Oct 6;7(1):12733.
Tompson SH, Kahn AE, Falk EB, Vettel JM, Bassett DS. Individual differences
in learning social and nonsocial network structures. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem
Cogn. 2018 Jul 19. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000580. [Epub ahead of print]
Christopher W. Lynn, Ari E. Kahn, Danielle S. Bassett. Structure from noise:
Mental errors yield abstract representations of events. In review at Nature
Physics. Also available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12491

November 20, 2018 NO CLASS

Week 13 (November 27, 2018) Brain Network Architecture. Aristotle’s Knowing Soul and
the Impulse to Know.
Led by: Bassett and Struck
General theme of the class: In this class, Prof. Bassett and Prof. Struck will each take
about an hour of the session to advance their separate lines of thinking, leaving
some time at the end for cross talk. Prof. Bassett will discuss the uncanny
similarities between the architectures of knowledge networks and the
architectures of neural networks in the brain that allow us to build knowledge
networks. We will then turn to a philosophical discussion of whether and how we
can extend this correlative observation to a claim regarding explanation and
mechanism for knowledge acquisition. Is the architecture of an optimally
learnable network a topological reflection of the architecture of an optimally
developed neural network? And if so, what does that tell us about the nature of
computation in the brain, and about the nature of curious thought? Prof. Struck
discuss Aristotle’s knowing soul as nature knowing itself. This will lead to a
broader set of questions about how we are able to know, and the depth of
Aristotle’s claim that this lies in our nature. We will explore the claim that our
own rationality works because it is isomorphic to the rationality of an intelligible
world.
Read before class: Bassett DS, Zurn P, Gold JI. On the nature and use of models in
network neuroscience. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2018 Jul 12. doi: 10.1038/s41583-018-
0038-8. [Epub ahead of print]. Available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30002509
AND
Aristotle, On the Soul, bk 3.3-8 (add 3.9-12 if you can make it! – see second paper
assignment below!); AND Lear, 4.3-5
Assignment due: Second paper due on Sunday Dec. 2, midnight. See below “Explanation
of Assignments.”
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Bullmore E, Sporns O. Complex brain networks:
graph theoretical analysis of structural and functional systems. Nat Rev Neurosci.
2009 Mar;10(3):186-98. AND Bassett DS, Mattar MG. A Network Neuroscience
 of Human Learning: Potential to Inform Quantitative Theories of Brain and
Behavior. Trends Cogn Sci. 2017 Apr;21(4):250-264.

Week 14 (December 4, 2018) Final Discussion.

Led by: Bassett and Struck
General theme of the class: In this final class, we will be quantitatively comparing the
two concept maps that you made in the class, and using that comparison to
discuss the network architecture of knowledge around curiosity, and how
curiosity can change knowledge networks over the period of a course. Bassett &
Struck may also close with a conclusive (or inconclusive) discussion regarding
their separate (integrated) lines of thinking.
Read before class: Nothing.
Assignment due: None.
References for further reading: Struck Divination and Human Nature (Princeton);
Bassett & Perry, Curious Minds, under contract at MIT Press.

Week 15 (December 11, 2018) No Class; Reading Days.

Week 16 (December 18, 2018) Lab Report 2 Due.

VIII. Explanation of Assignments

The assignments in this class are of three types: readings, written papers on a topic, and lab
reports detailing analysis of semantic networks extracted from papers. In this section, we provide
a bit more detail on exactly what those assignments entail.

Readings: Self-explanatory. Read the assigned readings before class.

Written papers:
Paper 1 is due on Sunday Sept. 23, midnight.
Here is your assignment:
You meet Tandelay O’Breckinridge, a high school senior visiting Penn, who brags about getting
a 5 on the AP Physics C Exam – perfect score. You act impressed, because you’re polite. But as
you walk away, you sort of wish you’d reacted differently. You’ve been reading Plato’s Meno,
Phaedo, and Republic very carefully for the past three weeks. You think Socrates would have
reacted differently. So… you go back to your dorm room and remind yourself of what the AP
Physics C Exam covers:
https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-physics-c-mechanics/about-the-exam
Then, you write up a Platonic dialogue (1500 words) in which Socrates cross-examines
Tandelay, and evaluates what Tandelay knows. You absolutely pack your dialogue with insight
into Plato’s ideas on knowledge, showing a thorough understanding of Plato’s views – then you
hand it in to your Prof.

Second paper due on Sunday Dec. 2, midnight.

Here is your assignment:
Pick a very short section of from Aristotle’s On the Soul, bk 3.9-12, which we won’t have time
to discuss in class (could be 10 words, could be 50, probably 100 is too much). Do a word-by-
word commentary on it to explain what each significant word in your selection means. (We’ll be
doing this sort of thing in class – and it’s a standard form of one of the very most respected types
of scholarship in Classical Studies!) Demonstrate your knowledge of the intricacies of Aristotle’s
thinking by unpacking each piece of the puzzle.

Lab Reports:
Lab Report 1 due on Oct. 30, midnight.
This first report should be written in the style of a scientific research article published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. It should include the following headings:
Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and References. Include a
schematic methods figure, and 1-2 results figures, which can be single or multi-panel. The topic
of the research article should be a network analysis of the semantic network present in your
Paper 1 (see description above). After extracting the semenatic network from your paper, you
will analyze it using a network analysis toolbox (in MATLAB:
https://sites.google.com/site/bctnet/, in Python: https://networkx.github.io/, in R
http://igraph.org/redirect.html). For visualization, you might consider Gephi (https://gephi.org/).

Lab Report 2 due on Dec. 18, midnight.

This second report should be written in the style of a grant proposal to the National Science
Foundation that proposes a research program motivated by the insights you obtain from using
network analysis to compare your first concept map constructed in the class to your second
concept map constructed in the class. The research program could be dedicated to network
science, education, psychology, philosophy, history, mathematics, engineering, computer
science, statistical physics, business, advertising, teaming, neuroscience, biology, or any other
discipline. The grant proposal should include the following headings: Project Summary, Specific
Aims, Background & Significance, Innovation, Approach, Pitfalls and Alternative Solutions,
Broader Impact. Aim for 1 figure on each page.

IX. Grading:
The numerical score will be based on the following course components:
• Attendance and Class Participation: 20%
• Paper 1: 20%
• Paper 2: 20%
• Lab Report 1: 20%
• Lab Report 2: 20%

**Late Homework will graded as a 0.** The final letter grade will also take into account non-
numerical assessments of your command of the subject matter as evaluated by the professors.

X. Course Accommodations:
Students may request accommodation based on religious creed, disabilities, and other special
circumstances. Please make an appointment to discuss your request with Profs. Bassett &
Struck.
XI. Attendance and absences:
Attendance at lectures is required and counts towards the final grade as indicated above. Planned
absences must be arranged in advance with Profs. Bassett & Struck. For serious illness that
causes a student to miss a HW assignment, which is not communicated well in advance to the
professors, a note from Student Health Service will be required.

XII. Vision:
We (Bassett & Struck) are keen to discuss cutting edge thought in our own fields, but also to
learn from one another and from the discussion occurring in this class. The discussion occurring
in this class is likely to inform our research in the coming years, and we very much hope it also
changes the way each of you thinks about thinking.