Long before universities divided knowledge into departments, people asked questions that crossed what we now call literature, philosophy, history, politics, religion, science, and the arts. 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. The 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.
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.
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. It gave the program’s enduring questions a new object—and gave students new ways to investigate them.
The full timeline →