Stanford Introductory Studies

ESF Courses

ESF 13 & 13A | Rebellious Minds | Paula Findlen

The struggle to know began long before you entered the university. The university as an institution has its origins in the late Middle Ages; it has been reinvented repeatedly as our ideas about education have changed. People have been rebelling against how institutions define learning (and for whom) ever since. This course introduces you to some of the most thoughtful and interesting reflections on the nature and purpose of an education, on knowledge and ignorance, at the birth of the modern world. Understanding the quest to discover the mind and to embrace learning as a lifelong endeavor is a starting point to reflect on the goals of your own education, as an engaged intellectual citizen of the world. This course satisfies the Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry or Social Inquiry Way (AII or SI).

Selected Source Material

  • Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Poems, Protest and a Dream
  • Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
  • Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative

ESF 17 & 17A | What Can You Do For Your Country? | Russell Berman

What does it mean to serve your country? All ethical systems train the individual to relinquish self-interest in favor of a larger communal good. When you applied to Stanford, you answered many application questions designed to elicit evidence of your ability to serve others, which is considered a sign of good character, leadership, and the ability to thrive beyond the confines of your family and private world. Knowing you’ve wrestled with this question at length, showing sacrifice, endurance, empathy, and understanding of higher goods, this course asks you to examine the nation’s view. How can the nation present itself as worthy of your personal sacrifice? Do you need to believe in the greatness of your nation to serve? What kind of cause demands your devotion? Nations have differently articulated such a commitment. Some make modest demands and promise you your own sovereignty. Others request only that you dream of national greatness as your own and that you lend a hand. But all nations require at some point, everything from you. What and when are you prepared to give? This course satisfies the Aesthetic and Interpretative Inquiry Way (AII).

Selected Source Material

  • John F. Kennedy, “What can you do for your Country”
  • Frederick Douglass, "What is the Fourth of July to a Slave?"
  • Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation-State" and "Ideology and Terror" excerpts from Origins of Totalitarianism
  • Nelson Mandela "I am prepared to Die"
  • Locke, Second Treatise of Government

ESF 18 & 18A | Between Gods and Beasts |  Sarah Prodan

Centuries ago, Plotinus famously wrote that humanity was "poised midway between gods and beasts" (Enneads 3.2.8). Some individuals 'grow like to the divine", he asserted, and "others to the brute". Since antiquity, many different societies, east and west, have understood education as a fundamental factor in determining whether individuals became fully realized as human beings, or something less. Considered a civilizing force for individuals and societies, education aimed not only at the acquisition of knowledge and skills, but also at the cultivation of goodness, the attainment of wisdom, and the achievement of happiness. In short, the goal of learning was to live well. What does it mean to live well? How does one cultivate one's nature or become one's best possible self? What kind of personal and intellectual development does this presuppose? Are there limits to the human capacity for self-development and change? In this course we will ponder such questions as we reflect critically on human nature and on historical and contemporary ideas regarding education, self-development, and living well. This course satisfies the Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry Way (AII).

Selected Source Material

  • The Four Books: The Basic Teachings of the Later Confucian Tradition
  • Coetzee, John Maxwell, The Lives of Animals
  • Della Casa, Giovanni, Galateo: Or, The Rules of Polite Behavior
  • Haidt, Jonathan, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
  • Pope, Alexander, An Essay on Man

ESF 22 & 22A | Confronting the Diversity of Life |  Kevin Boyce

The class will approach the travel writings of early modern scientists who used exposure to the tropics to establish the foundations of evolutionary biology. These first generations of scientists both had to learn from each other and make it up as they went along. Humboldt's travels from 1799-1804 were an inspiration for Darwin's travels in the 1830s. Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle inspired Wallace and Bates to go to the Amazon a generation later. None of them were far removed from being students themselves: Darwin, Wallace, and Bates were all in their early 20s when starting out and Humboldt was an old man of 29. Their writings capture the excitement of their youth, their scientific idealism, and the breadth and depth of their interest in the natural world. We can explore the history of the science and the modern updating of that science. There is also taking advantage of being exposed to new horizons, the importance of a rigorous curiosity in life, the recognition of unique opportunity. This course does not satisfy any Ways.

Selected Source Material

  • Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent
  • Charles Darwin,  Voyage of the Beagle
  • Ida Pfeiffer, A Lady's Second Journey Round the World


ESF 23 & 23A | Heroes and Heroism | Yiqun Zhou

Drawing upon Chinese, Greek, and Roman literary, philosophical, and historical writings, the seminar would examine, in a comparative light, concepts of heroism and models of courage, fortitude, and leadership in these paradigmatic ancient traditions. Possible authors: Mencius, Sima Qian, Liu Xiang, Guan Hanqing, and Ji Junxiang; Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Virgil, and Seneca. This course satisfies the Aesthetic and Interpretive Inquiry or Ethical Reasoning Way (AII or ER).

ESF 26 & 26A | Trashed! Waste and Our Planetary Predicament | Gabrielle Hecht

We are what we eat, but we are also what we waste. Yet that aspect of our selves (and our planet) is rarely discussed, meaning we all need an education in waste. That need becomes ever-more urgent as humans turn the planet inside out, digging vast quantities of materials out of the ground and spreading them across land, water, and air. The mass of everything ever made now exceeds that of all living things. Waste accounts for mounting proportions of this anthropogenic mass. In our epoch, waste has become the main event. But what does it mean to designate things, places, or people as waste? How does the meaning of waste change, and how does it reflect value systems? In exploring such questions, this course takes you on a historical world tour that ranges from human excrement to greenhouse gases, and from southern Africa to the Norwegian Arctic.  It encourages you to begin your Stanford education by reflecting on how each of us contributes to the worlds of waste we create and inhabit.  Ways approval pending.

ESF 27 & 27A | What’s the Point of Culture? | Dominick Lawton

Studying art or literature has the reputation of being notoriously unprofitable, even useless. At the same time, the richest and most powerful people on earth, from America in the 2020s to the Italian Renaissance and long before, feel compelled to pick sides among cultural movements and weigh in on aesthetic questions. What we now call "liberal education" has its origins in antiquity with the ideal of the liberal arts, and medieval curricula placed rhetoric and music as equally important to arithmetic and astronomy. Was Fyodor Dostoevsky right in saying that "beauty will save the world?" Or was Kurt Vonnegut correct to say that the power of art to directly affect society "turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high?" In this course, we will interrogate the social role of the arts and read some of the most insightful — and, in some cases, influential — reflections on the force of aesthetics to shape the world.   Ways approval pending

Selected Source Material

  • Plato
  • Bertolt Brecht
  • Leon Trotsky
  • Lydia Ginzburg
  • Judith Butler