Through Voltaire, Kant, Austen, the English Romantic Poets, Whitman and Dickinson, as well as the music of Beethoven, we examine questions of social hierarchy and what it means to know, the relation of subjectivity to reason, and our relationship with nature. Then, from the radical perspective of Nietzsche, returning to 20th-century America with W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, and ending with Virginia Woolf's Modernist response to World War I, we see the roots of the modern world's questioning of what is knowable and our revaluation of the moral and philosophic bases of human life. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS. This course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Ethical Reasoning, Writing-intensive Course.