From the death of Brahms to sound on the internet, this talk will explore how people have thought about music in the twentieth century and what might lie ahead. From positivist and modernist to feminist and post-modernist and beyond, the ways in which music has been analysed have mirrored major philosophical stances. Dan Graves will open with a brief overview of musicology based in the Western tradition, Gerald Groemer will follow with developments into ethnomusicology and world music, and Trudi Weyermann will conclude with music and technology.

The achievements of 20th century mathematics are largely invisible to the public, yet they are as great as those of any prior century. In 1900, David Hilbert proposed a list of 23 unsolved problems to challenge the mathematicians of the 20th century. Hilbert's Problems reflect where mathematics stood at the turn of the century and point to topics and methods that dramatically shaped mathematics in our own century. Just as interesting are the mathematical discoveries that Hilbert did not imagine, including Gödel's revolutionary work in logic, Emmy Noether's program of focusing on structure and abstraction, and the development of electronic computers.

A personal glimpse of the seminal new theories in physics which have been developed and verified during our century. We shall investigate the consequences of these new areas of knowledge, and look at the men and women who were instrumental in these developments. Some emphasis will be placed on the ways in which these theories have changed our lives and our world view.

A little over a century ago it was still possible to be skeptical about the existence of atoms and molecules. Today most scientists believe that molecules can be seen almost as directly as bacteria under a microscope. Along the way, chemistry has truly become a science of molecular transformation, and in the process it has also profoundly changed the world. Technological milestones in the last century highlight the ways in which experiments, faulty-but-useful models, insight, and money have led to the present state of the science. Will we need chemistry through the next millennium? Will fears and mistrust of this science diminish its future? Are we reaching the limits of what can be known in this arena?

Paleontological, climatological evidence, and the continent-to-continent distribution of ore bodies have long suggested that Earth's continents have episodically rent, drifted and fused throughout geologic time. For lack of a sufficient energy source such movement was deemed impossible by other physical scientist until quantitative data collected from the sea bottom in the 1950s and 1960s strongly suggested past continental movement. Plate Tectonics swept geology as a new paradigm in the middle 1960s as a comprehensive, unifying theory of Earth evolution which includes these observations, proposes mechanisms for crustal movement, and explains the distribution of earthquakes, volcanoes and mountains.

The 20th century begins with the rediscovery of Mendel's principles of inheritance, and Darwin's ideas on natural selection are in almost universal disfavor. It is not until the 30's and 40's that the theoretical foundation of evolution is forged with the great Modern Synthesis, blending Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetic inheritance. Many of the principles in the Modern Synthesis have been challenged and subsequently modified since the synthesis, but evolution by natural selection has emerged as a fact, not a hypothesis.

From its birth in mathematics to the development of technology which now affects virtually every aspect of day-to-day life, computer science has covered an enormous amount of territory over the past 100 years. There are many theoretical and technical milestones to be examined, with respect to both the development of the discipline itself and in terms of the technology which comes from computer science. An understanding of this history is crucial if society is to make informed decisons about the appropriate role of technology in the 21st century.

The publication of J.M. Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, & Money in 1936 initiated the so-called "Keynesian revolution" which led economists to analyze unemployment and public policy in radically new ways. Contemporaneous advances in statistical theory, and post-World War II developments in computers, made possible empirical testing of economic theory on an unprecedented scale. A post-war "monetarist" counter-revolution to Keynes renewed traditional emphasis on independent changes in the stock of money as causes of economic fluctuations. The social ferment of the 1960's opened new areas of research into poverty, gender and race.

Five of the most important psychological studies that changed the discipline and society will be presented. Areas included are social, developmental, and clincial psychology. We will examine the theory, methods, results, and implications of each study. Come hear how these important studies shaped and developed the science of human behavior as well as the larger society.

In the last twenty years, historians have changed profoundly both the questions they pose and the ways in which they answer them. The literature on the meaning and history of the Weimar Republic will serve as a case in point and allow Bob Southard to illustrate and explain these changes.

Across the centuries there has been no absence of thought on the ways we acquire the ability to formulate, send and receive linguistic messages, and, by extension, the ways we design and provide instruction in a second language. Although pre-20th Century theories on the learning and teaching of languages may have been commonsensical, even compelling, they were weak in their explanatory power. It has only been in this century that second language acquisition, as a complex mental phenomenon, has become knowable, describable, predictable, and manageable. Building upon psychology, linguistics, education, and anthropology, the field of second-language acquisition may not have put together all the pieces of the puzzle, but it has made significant, even breathtaking, progress.

Western philosophy in the 20th century has been deeply divided between "analytic" philosophy (in the English speaking countries) and "continental" philosophy (in Europe and Latin America). Yet on both sides we find a common theme: a fundamental attempt to revise the traditional program of philosophy. Does this attempt constitute a retreat from the grand ambitions of classical philosophy or is it a long-needed critique of past philosophical dogma? We will explore how this schism and crisis in 20th century philosophy developed, how contemporary philosophy is positioned to answer the perennial questions that actually arise in life, and how philosophy can work through the historical challenges it has faced during the century as it attempts to renew itself.

Peace studies emerged as a normative response by social scientists to the direct and structural violence of the twentieth century. The interests of the field are essentially practical: how to achieve conflict resolution, how to secure social justice, how to do the work of building peace. As peace is defined within the field as more than the absence of war and as we experience growing global interdependence, scholars and practitioners have turned their attention to a wide variety of problems, including economic injustice, violations of human rights, and ecological imbalance. Thus Global Studies, the analysis of systems that originate, perpetuate, and may resolve these problems, has become a necessary partner of Peace Studies.

In the 19th century, Matthew Arnold predicted that the future for poetry (literature) would be immense because poetry, the feeling level, not fact, was the core of religion. Literature has replaced religion for some people, while for others it has suffered religion's fate, made meaningless except as entertainment by modern science. Twentieth century literary criticism has engaged in a number of strategies for "saving" literature, which might be divided into criticism of form and criticism of content. We will examine major themes in that critical enterprise.

Changes in Classics in the past century have come with the discoveries researchers make every day, lost pieces of a vase or a new way of understanding a particular word in a text for instance. The most profound changes, however, have come as one generation has asked questions that an earlier one had not thought to ask. The questions raised by feminist critics illustrate this. Amidst all this change, though, one question remains: Are we making progress in our understanding of antiquity?

The effort of African American Studies has been to claim for African Americans their own narrative. During the first half of the century the master narrative, when not ignoring peoples of African descent, was discussing Blacks as the objects of white institutions and practices, arguing the merits of slavery as a civilizing and Christianizing force. After mid-century, along with the Civil Rights Movement and the creation of African American Studies programs, came the insistence that the experience of African Americans be subject not object: let literature and history identify the values and institutions that helped Blacks survive slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized assumptions of white superiority. At present, history, literature and literary criticism are examining African American cultural distinctives and the ways in which these have infiltrated and shaped the dominant culture.

In early 20th century theological circles the prevailing positions tended to combine enlightenment trust in reason and culture with those elements in the religious traditions which shared that trust. This ‘liberalism' was shaken by developments in scholarship and by the cataclysm of World War I. Thinkers, with new tools and deepened sensibilities, explored their respective traditions' historical sources, yielding some monumental theological syntheses which largely set the agenda through the 1950's. But a new revolution had been prepared by World War II, the holocaust, advancing scholarship, and the emerging liberation movements. The achievements of 1920 to 1960 were put into question in the latter part of the century both by a series of ‘liberation theologies' accusing existing religious thought forms of supporting social structures of domination, and by the expanded use of social-scientific, historical, and philosophical tools to question the epistemological foundations of the reigning syntheses.

In addition to these speakers from the Earlham faculty, the Staley Lecturer for 1997-98, George Marsden, has agreed to speak on the series topic from the standpoint of his discipline, Religion, on April 1, 1998, 1:00 pm. His talk is entitled, Why Christian Viewpoints Became Suspect.

The lecture will tell the story of the transition in mainstream American collegiate education from a century ago when religious viewpoints were taken for granted to the present day when they are considered out of bounds at many leading schools.