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What is General Education? |
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General Knowledge |
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Modes of Inquiry |
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List of all GEMs |
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Important Information for Students |
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Guidelines for Student Exchange Programmes |
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Frequently Asked Questions |
In the Modes of Inquiry (MI) modules, which also
deal with substantial bodies of knowledge, the focus shifts to the modes
of inquiry.
A
Modes of Inquiry
module in engineering, mathematics, physics, biology, psychology,
or history, for instance, deals with the modes of thinking
characteristic of engineers, physicists, biologists, psychologists, or
historians respectively. Thus, in addition to learning the knowledge
content of these disciplines, students learn how
to think like an engineer, mathematician, physicist, biologist,
psychologist, or historian.
These modules provide an initial understanding of academic inquiry, and
where possible, preliminary first hand experience of academic research.
In the course of an introduction to academic inquiry, students also acquire
the capacity for independent learning and critical thinking.
Modes of Inquiry
modules
typically emphasize learning outcomes which include:
- critical understanding of the core evidence and argumentation that supports or refutes the leading ideas in a field;
- appreciation of the similarities and differences in the modes of generating and critically evaluating knowledge in academic pursuits;
- awareness of their relative strengths and limitations in the exploration of a given question or problem;
- ability to engage in the modes appropriate to a given situation; and
- the mindset characterized by intellectual curiosity, openness of mind and questioning spirit, resulting from an understanding and practice of these modes.
Bibliography
For the Intelligent Educated Lay Persons: A sample bibliography of
books useful for GE
Given
below is a list of books that may turn out to be useful for various GE
Modules. Many of the authors are Nobel laureates writing on their own
disciplines from an internal perspective. They are not "textbooks" in
the traditional sense, and yet they are accessible to the late teens.
* - Titles which contain discussions on Modes of Inquiry.
** - Titles which contain extensive insightful discussions on Modes of Inquiry.
| Mathematics | |
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Casti, John L (1996) Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, John Wiley and Sons |
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Devlin, Keith (1994) Mathematics: The Science of Patterns, Scientific American Library |
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Garfunkel, Solomon A ed. (1994) For All Practical Purposes: Introduction to Contemporary Mathematics, W.H.Wheeler and Company |
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Hardy, G.H. (1967) A Mathematician's Apology, Cambridge University Press (First published in 1940) |
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King, Jerry P. (1992) The Art of Mathematics, Fawcett Columbine |
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Kline, Morris (1985) Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge, Oxford University Press |
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Paulos, John Allen (1989) Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences, Farraar, Stauss, and Giroux |
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Paulos, John Allen (1991) Beyond Numeracy: An Uncommon Dictionary of Mathematics, Penguin Books |
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Paulos, John Allen (19..) A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper |
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Paulos, John Allen (1998) Once Upon a Number, Basic Books |
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Rowntree, Derek (1981) Statistics without Tears: A Primer for Non-Mathematicians, Macmillan |
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Singh, Simon (1997) Fermat's Enigma, Anchor Books |
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Stewart, Ian (1975) Concepts of Modern Mathematics, Penguin |
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Stewart, Ian (1995) Nature's Numbers: Discovering Order and Pattern in the Universe, Phoenix |
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Stewart, Ian & Golubitsky, Martin (1992) Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer? Blackwell |
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| Biological Sciences | |
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Bodmer, Walter & McKie, Robin (1994) The Book of Man: The Quest to Discover Our Genetic Heritage, Little, Brown and Company |
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Cairnes-Smith, A.G. (1985) Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press |
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Dawkins, Marian Stamp (1993) Through our eyes only? The Search for Animal Consciousness, Oxford University Press |
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Dawkins, Richard (1989) The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press |
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Dawkins, Richard (1982) The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press |
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Depew, David J, & Weber, Bruce H. (1986) Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, MIT Press |
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Gribbin, John (1985) In Search of the Double Helix: Quantum Physics and Life, Corgi Books |
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Jacob, Franciois (1973) The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, Pantheon Books |
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Mayr, Ernst Mayr (1991) One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought, Penguin Books |
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Mayr, Ernst (1997) This is Biology: The Science of the Living World, Harvard University Press |
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Monad, Jacques (1970) Chance and Necessity, Collins/Fount Paperback |
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Moore, John A. (1993) Science as a Way of Knowing: The Foundations of Modern Biology, Harvard University Press |
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Pollack, Robert (1994) Signs of Life: The Language and Meaning of DNA, Penguin Books |
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Ridley, Mark (1985) The Problems of Evolution, Oxford University Press |
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Ridley, Mark (1999) Genome: The autobiography of a species in 23 Chapters, Harper Collins |
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Ruse, Michael ed. (1998) Philosophy of Biology, Prometheus Books |
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Wills, Chrisopher (1991) The Wisdom of the Genes: New Pathways in Evolution, Oxford University Press |
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Wilson, Edward O. (1984) Biophilia: The human bond with other species, Harvard University Press |
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Wilson, Edward O. (1996) In Search of Nature, Island Press |
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Wolpert, Lewis (1991) The Triumph of the Embryo, Oxford University Press |
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Carl Sagan (1979) Dragons of Eden : Speculations on the evolution of human intelligence, London: Coronet Books |
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| Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity | |
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Coveney, Peter & Highfield, Roger (1995) Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World, Faber and Faber |
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Davis, Paul (19..)The Cosmic Code |
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Kauffman, Stuart (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press |
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Ruelle, David (1991) Chance and Chaos, Penguin Books |
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Steward, Ian (1945) Does God Play Dice? : The Mathematics of Chaos |
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| Mind and Brain Sciences | |
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Butterworth, Brian (1999) What Counts: How every brain is hardwired for math, New York: The Free Press |
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Calvin, William H. & Ojemann, George A. (1994) Conversations with Neil's Brain, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company |
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Carter, Rita (1998) Mapping the Mind, University of California Press |
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Crick, Francis (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Charles Scribner's Sons |
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Damasio, Antonio (1995) Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Avon Hearst |
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Damasio, Antonio (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt Brace and Company |
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Dennett, Daniel C. (1991) Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company |
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Dennett, Daniel C. (1995) Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness, Phoenix |
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Gazzaniga, Michel (1988) Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives, Houghton Miffin Company |
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LeDoux, Joseph (1996) The Emotional Brain, The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, Touchstone |
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Ramachandran, V.S. & Blakeslee, Sandra (1998) Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, William Morrow and Company |
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Rose, Steven (1992) The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind, Anchor Books |
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Rosenfield, Israel (1988) The Invention of Memory: The New View of the Brain, Basic Books |
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Searle, John (1984) Minds, Brains & Science, Penguin Books |
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Weiskrantz, Lawrence (1997) Consciousness Lost and Found, Oxford University Press |
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| Medicine | |
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Groopman, Jerome (2000) Second Opinions: Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine, Viking |
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Melzack, Ronald & Wall, Patrick D. (1982) The Challenge of Pain, Penguin Books |
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| Science in General | |
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Asimov, Isaac (1984) Asimov's New Guide to Science, Basic Books, New York |
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Barrow, John D (1991) Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, Clarendon Press |
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Brody, David E & Brody Arnold R. (1997) The Science Class You Wish You Had, A Perigee Book |
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Chandrashekhar, S. (1987) Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, The University of Chicago Press |
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Fleck, Ludwik (1979) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, The University of Chicago Press (Original in German published in 1935) |
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Gell-Man, Murray (1994) The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, Abacus |
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Gribbin, John (1998) Almost Everyone's Guide to Science, Weidenfield & Nicolson, Yale University Press |
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Grinnell, Frederick (1992) The Scientific Attitude, The Guilford Press |
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Hackman, Sandra (1999) The Nova Reader: Science at the Turn of the Millenium, TV Books |
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Hazen, Robert M & Trefil, James (1992) Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing |
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Holton, Gerald (1998) The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies, Harvard University Press |
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Holton, Gerald (1993) Science and Anti-Science, Harvard University Press |
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Jeans, James (1981) Physics and Philosophy, Dover Publications (First published in 1941) |
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Marshall, Ian & Zohar, Danah (1997) Who's Afraid of Schrodinger's Cat? All the New Science Ideas You Need to Keep UP with the New Thinking, William Morrow and Company |
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Medawar, Peter B. (1979) Advice to a Young Scientist, Basic Books |
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Poincare, Henri (1952) Science and Hypotheses, Dover Publications (First published in 1905) |
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Schrodinger, Erwin (1967) What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell & Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press |
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Toulmin, Stephen & Goodfield, June (1965) The Fabric of Heavens: The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics, Harper Torchbooks |
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Toulmin, Stephen & Goodfield, June (1962) The Architecture of Matter, Harper Torchbooks |
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Wilber, Ken ed. (1984) Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists, Shambala Publications |
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Wilson, Bright E. (1952) An Introduction to Scientific Research, McGraw-Hill |
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Wolpert, Lewis (1992) The Unnatural Nature of Science: Why science does not make (common) sense, Faber and Faber |
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Ziman, John (1978) Reliable Knowledge: En Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science, Cambridge University Press |
| Engineering and Technology | |
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Weiner, Norbert (1994) Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas, The MIT Press (Written in 1954) |
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| Distinguishing between Dubious and Reliable Knowledge | |
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Huber, Peter W. (1991) Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, Basic Books |
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Cres, Frederick et al (1995) The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute, Granta Books |
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Gardner, Martin (1991) The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher, Prometheus Books |
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Godfrey, Laurie R. ed (1983) Scientists Confront Creationism, W.W.Norton and Company |
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Gross, Paul R. & Levitt, Norman (1994) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, The Johns Hopkins University Press |
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Sagan, Carl (1995) The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House |
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Sokal, Alan & Brichmont, Jean (1997) Intellectual Impostures, Profile Books |
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Zimmerman, Michael (1995) Science, Nonscience, and Nonsense: Approaching Environmental Literacy, The Johns Hopkins University Press |
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| Science and Religion | |
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Barbour, Ian G. (2000) When Science Meets Religion, Harper San Fransisco |
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| History | |
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Elton, G.R. (1967) The Practice of History, Fontana Press |
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| Philosophy | |
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Scruton, Roger (1994) Modern Philosophy: A Survey, Sinclair-Stevenson |
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| Social Sciences | |
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Sim, Stuart ed. (1999) The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, Routledge |
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| Knowledge, Thinking, and Education | |
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Dewey, John (1997) How we think, a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process, Dover Publications (first published in 1910) |
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Wilson, Edward O. (1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Alfred E. Knoff |
