Lively journey across Western ideas and art

The University of Wollongong says its degree on Western civilisation will be a chronological philosophical adventure.

The Pallas Athena statue in front of the Austrian Parliament in Vienna.

The University of Wollongong says its new Ramsay Centre-sponsored bachelor degree in Western civilisation is inspired by the idea of a conversation in which: “Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak (their) mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.”

The 1952 quote, from American philosopher Robert Hutchins, is cited by the university in the material released last night on its website to promote the new ­degree.

It says in the document on curriculum design that the course will take students on “on a chronologically ordered philosophical adventure through the major periods and epochs of intellectual and artistic change in the West”.

“At each stage of their journey, students will engage first-hand with exemplary masterpieces of Western thought, art and architecture (and) bring them into dialogue with the some of the greatest exemplars of non-Western traditions,” the university says.

Students will take 16 core subjects, including a capstone unit on Australian democracy, as well as doing a major selected from a list including: archeology and ancient history; creative writing; languages; history; indigenous studies; sociology; English literature; philosophy; politics; international relations; and global sustainable development.

The students can also choose to pair the course with another to do a double degree, or do honours in Western civilisation to help them develop more advanced research and critical thinking skills.

The 16 core units of the University of Wollongong’s BA in Western Civilisation, beginning in 2020

The university is at pains to make clear that Western civilisation students will “be introduced to non-Western and under-represented voices and perspectives”.

“To take one example, students will be exposed to alternative readings of Western classics, such as Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018), which is lauded as an outstanding feminist retelling of the Iliad,” the curriculum design document says.

The university says it has taken inspiration from Yale-NUS, the liberal arts college in Singapore that is a collaboration between Yale and the National University of Singapore.

At Yale-NUS “students study not only Plato and Aristotle but also, in the same course, Confucius and the Buddha — and ask why their systems of ethics might be similar or different,” the University of Wollongong says. “They study the Odyssey and the Ramayana. They examine the ‘primitivisms’ of Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso while also looking at the woodcarvings from the South Sea islands and the ukiyo-e tradition of Japanese woodblock prints that influenced Western artists.”

The university says that, despite the course’s focus on Western thought and art, it also “initiates well-placed, high-quality conversations” on non-Western traditions in half of its 16 core units.

It also argues that the new degree is “inherently cross-disciplinary”, combining elements of study of the classics, literature and philosophy. And the university points out that students can, if they choose, take something non-Western in a double degree.