Long before universities divided knowledge into departments, people asked questions that crossed the humanities, social sciences, arts, and sciences. What does it mean to be human? What makes a life worth living? What do we owe one another? How should knowledge and power be used?

IPHS was founded in 1975 to make room for that larger conversation. Co-founder Robert Goodhand taught three of its original courses: Human Predicament in Nature, Human Predicament in History, and Freedom and Responsibility in the Modern World. Their titles give the program’s “big questions” a durable shape:

What is our nature?

What makes us human, and what do we need to flourish?

How has history shaped us?

Which parts of our inheritance remain valuable, and which assumptions should we rethink?

What can we become?

Given those natural and historical conditions, what ought we create?

Odyssey has always been broad because human life is broad. Students encounter works and ideas from many periods and traditions, while faculty from across the College teach in conversation with one another. The aim is not coverage for its own sake, but the understanding that becomes possible when Homer, Plato, political philosophy, intellectual history, literature, religion, science, music, and the arts are not sealed off from one another.

A conversation shared beyond Kenyon

The six-part Modern Scholar series The Odyssey of the West brought IPHS faculty and colleagues together in recorded lectures distributed internationally through Audible and library platforms. Tim Shutt, Katherine Elkins, Fred Baumann, Ted Buehrer, Joel Richeimer, and others introduced listeners around the world to the literature, philosophy, history, politics, religion, and art of the Western tradition.

Katherine Elkins’s Modern Scholar courses on the modern novel and French literature extended that public work. Together, these lectures established an international audience for the kind of integrated inquiry long practiced in IPHS.

The questions remained; the world changed

Machines now produce language, tell stories, influence decisions, preserve and distort memory, and participate in institutions. Understanding them requires programming, statistics, and machine learning. It also requires knowledge of language and interpretation, history and culture, political and social life, ethics, law, and human judgment.

In 2016, IPHS began building a human-centered AI curriculum that brought these forms of knowledge together. It did not replace the older program. Building technologies that serve people requires an understanding of human nature and flourishing. It requires examining inherited ideas about intelligence, creativity, autonomy, and the good life. And because the technologies we create can reshape how we think, relate, and live, it makes the program’s founding questions newly urgent.