More about our course

An image of a Justice tarot card, number 11 in the deck. The card has a gray border with vines at the corners. Centered on the gray border at the top is the number XI and at the bottom the word “Justice” written in capital letters. In the center of the card, a crow stands with its wings spread in front of a blue and green nature scene. In the top left corner of the background is a black bird cage, and in top right corner is a purple flock of birds. Above the crow’s head is a large golden crown, and a bright red ribbon is covering its eyes. Near its tail feathers is a sword, resting in front of a bouquet of coneflowers. In the crow’s left foot is a bright red set of weighing scales.
Who’s in the course? 14 amazing liberal arts students!

No art pre-reqs, no formal art instruction! We are all working through how to understand imagery in ideas and how to create images showing our own ideas.

Instructor: Rachel Levit Ades

We meet 3 times a week for 4 weeks, students complete art responses after week-long discussion.

Course Readings

Week 1 (4/29, 4/30, 5/1): Light and Blindness

Tues: Intro

  • No assigned reading, discussion and activities with: justice, art, alt-text.

Wed: Seeing the Light?

  • selection from Plato’s Republic, 514a-521d

Thurs: Sight

  • Jonas, Hans. 1954. “The Nobility of Sight.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14 (4): 507–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2103230.
  • Kleege, Georgina. 2018. “Introduction.” In More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, 1–13. New York: Oxford University Press.

Week 2 (5/6, 5/7, 5/8): Veils and Ideal Theory

Tues: Veil of Ignorance and Rawls

Reading:

  • selection from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice

Wed: cont.

Thurs: Criticisms

Reading:

  • Mills, Charles W. 2005. “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology.” Hypatia 20 (3): 165–84.
  • Valentini, Laura. 2012. “Ideal vs. Non‐ideal Theory: A Conceptual Map.” Philosophy Compass 7 (9): 654–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2012.00500.x.

Week 3 (5/13, 5/14, 5/15): Justice The Person

Tuesday: Lady Justice

Reading:

  • Curtis, Dennis E, and Judith Resink. 1987. “Images of Justice.” The Yale Law Journal 96 (July): 1727–72.

Wed: Colorblindness                                                         

  • “Intro” and “Revisiting Colorblindness” in Obasogie, Osagie Kingsley. 2014. Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford law books.

Thurs: Race in Visual Storytelling

Week 4 (5/20, 5/21, 5/22): Fairness and Equality

Tues: Equality and Equity?

  • Anderson, Elizabeth S. 1999. “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (2): 287–337.

Wed: Metaphors & Equity

Reading:

  • Froehle, Craig. 2022. “The Evolution of an Accidental Meme.” Medium (blog). November 28, 2022. https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-meme-ddc4e139e0e4.
  • Nussbaum, Abraham M., and Matthew Allen. 2022. “Health Equity Is No Spectator Sport: The Radical Rooting of a Post-Pandemic Bioethics.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 65 (4): 586–95.

Thurs: Equitable Division

Reading:

  • Nalebuff, Barry, Adam Brandenburger, Ted Cavanaugh, and Chelsea Cavanaugh. 2021. “Rethinking Negotiation.” Harvard Business Review 99 (6): 110–19.
  • Selection from Miller, David. 2023. “Justice.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Fall 2023. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/justice/.