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Danielle S. Bassett is the Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor in the
Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She is most well known for her
work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition
and disease in human brain networks. She is currently writing a book for MIT Press entitled
Curious Minds, with co-author Perry Zurn Professor of Philosophy at American University. She
received a B.S. in physics from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University
of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and as an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a
postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center
for the Study of the Mind. She has received multiple prestigious awards, including American
Psychological Association's ‘Rising Star’ (2012), Alfred P Sloan Research Fellow (2014),
MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant (2014), Early Academic Achievement Award from the IEEE
Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (2015), Harvard Higher Education Leader (2015),
Office of Naval Research Young Investigator (2015), National Science Foundation CAREER
(2016), Popular Science Brilliant 10 (2016), Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems Science
(2017), Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science (2018). She is the author of more than 180 peer-
reviewed publications, which have garnered over 13000 citations, as well as numerous book
chapters and teaching materials. She is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization
Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network
science and the visual arts. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation,
the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, the Army Research Laboratory, the
Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, the John
D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the Paul Allen Foundation, the ISI Foundation, and
the University of Pennsylvania.
Peter T. Struck is Professor and Chair of the Department of Classical Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program and founder of its
Integrated Studies curriculum. He is cofounder (with Sarah Igo) of the National Forum on the
Future of Liberal Education, and has worked with foundations, media organizations, and
scholarly societies to promote the liberal arts. He works on the intellectual history of Greek and
Roman antiquity. His book Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts
(Princeton 2004) won the C. J. Goodwin Award from the American Philological Association for
best book in Classical Studies. His most recent book is Divination and Human Nature: A
Cognitive History of Intuition in Antiquity, (Princeton 2016), for which he also won the
Goodwin Award, becoming the first person to win the award twice. He edited Mantikê (with
Sarah Iles Johnston, Brill 2006), the Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with Rita Copeland,
Cambridge 2010), and is general editor (with Sophia Rosenfeld) of the six-volume Cultural
History of Ideas forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic in 2020. He is currently writing a
popular book on mythology for Princeton University Press. He has given dozens of lectures at
universities in the United States and Europe, and has held fellowships from the National
Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the
Mellon Foundation, the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the
American Academy in Rome. He has won multiple teaching awards at Penn, including the
Lindback Award, the university's top teaching prize.
Lectures, discussion, and activities will occur Tuesday 1:30pm-4:30pm (EAS 244, CLST 344,
INTG 344).
IV. Scope: The course examines two approaches to the still unanswered question of what
happens when humans create knowledge. How should we describe the impulse, or set of
impulses, that leads us to seek it? What is happening when we achieve it? And how do we
describe the new state in which we find ourselves after we have it? We will study the work of
contemporary physicists and cognitive scientists on these questions along side the approaches
developed by the two most powerful thinkers from antiquity on the topic, Plato and Aristotle.
The course will begin with Plato on knowledge, followed by an introduction to tools from
network science and statistical physics that can be used to evaluate the structure of knowledge,
the acquisition of knowledge, and the generation of new knowledge. The second portion of the
course will focus on Aristotle’s thoughts on wonder, teleology in nature, gradients of the mind,
and related topics, followed by an introduction to theories and tools from network neuroscience
and cognitive science on the practice of curiosity. The goal of the course is to provide students
with the conceptual tools to consider what curiosity is, what its value is, what its dangers are,
how it can be quantified, and how to measure it in their own writing and that of historical
thinkers. What makes a good idea? What drives innovation? How can we foster it?
V. Texts.
Ancient Texts: Ackrill, ed., New Aristotle Reader (Princeton); Reeve, ed., A Plato Reader
(Hackett); and, as a guide to Aristotle, Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand
(Cambridge).
Modern Texts: We will be reading primary scientific literature in the form of research articles,
which are available online from any computer on the Penn network. Other relevant papers or
books that may be of interest for future reading are noted in the section entitled Detailed Weekly
Schedule.
General Reading: If you are generally interested in interdisciplinary accounts of curiosity you
might enjoy Curiosity Studies: Toward a New Ecology of Knowledge, edited by Perry Zurn &
Arjun Shankar, Minnesota Press, To Appear (2018). You might also consider perusing a few
more circumscribed collections which, while interdisciplinary, nevertheless focus more directly
on field hubs relevant to their topics: e.g. La Curiosité; Vestiges du savoir, edited by Nicole
Czechowski (Paris: Autrement, 1993), Curiosité et Libido sciendi de la Renaissance aux
Lumières, eds. Jacques-Chaquin and Sophie Houdard (Paris: ENS Editions, 1998), Women and
Curiosity in Early Modern England, eds. Line Cottegnies, Sandrine Parageau, and John J.
Thompson (Boston: Brill, 2016), The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, eds. Ilhan Inan, Lani
Watson, Dennis Whitcomb, and Safiye Yigit (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), and The
New Science of Curiosity, ed. Goren Gordon (New York: Nova Publishers, 2018).
Week 4 (September 18, 2018) Plato on the Urge to Know and Where it Leads
Led by: Struck.
General theme of the class: This week we will work to understand where Plato thinks
knowledge can lead us. It will also allow us to see how deeply ideas of
knowledge are embedded in questions of ontology – surely for Plato, and
probably for anyone.
Read before class: Republic, 473d (middle of book 5) – 521d (middle of book 7)
Assignment due: First paper due on Sunday Sept. 23, midnight. See below “Explanation
of Assignments.”
Week 13 (November 27, 2018) Brain Network Architecture. Aristotle’s Knowing Soul and
the Impulse to Know.
Led by: Bassett and Struck
General theme of the class: In this class, Prof. Bassett and Prof. Struck will each take
about an hour of the session to advance their separate lines of thinking, leaving
some time at the end for cross talk. Prof. Bassett will discuss the uncanny
similarities between the architectures of knowledge networks and the
architectures of neural networks in the brain that allow us to build knowledge
networks. We will then turn to a philosophical discussion of whether and how we
can extend this correlative observation to a claim regarding explanation and
mechanism for knowledge acquisition. Is the architecture of an optimally
learnable network a topological reflection of the architecture of an optimally
developed neural network? And if so, what does that tell us about the nature of
computation in the brain, and about the nature of curious thought? Prof. Struck
discuss Aristotle’s knowing soul as nature knowing itself. This will lead to a
broader set of questions about how we are able to know, and the depth of
Aristotle’s claim that this lies in our nature. We will explore the claim that our
own rationality works because it is isomorphic to the rationality of an intelligible
world.
Read before class: Bassett DS, Zurn P, Gold JI. On the nature and use of models in
network neuroscience. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2018 Jul 12. doi: 10.1038/s41583-018-
0038-8. [Epub ahead of print]. Available here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30002509
AND
Aristotle, On the Soul, bk 3.3-8 (add 3.9-12 if you can make it! – see second paper
assignment below!); AND Lear, 4.3-5
Assignment due: Second paper due on Sunday Dec. 2, midnight. See below “Explanation
of Assignments.”
References for further reading: If the topics in this class are/were particularly interesting
to you, you might also enjoy Bullmore E, Sporns O. Complex brain networks:
graph theoretical analysis of structural and functional systems. Nat Rev Neurosci.
2009 Mar;10(3):186-98. AND Bassett DS, Mattar MG. A Network Neuroscience
of Human Learning: Potential to Inform Quantitative Theories of Brain and
Behavior. Trends Cogn Sci. 2017 Apr;21(4):250-264.
The assignments in this class are of three types: readings, written papers on a topic, and lab
reports detailing analysis of semantic networks extracted from papers. In this section, we provide
a bit more detail on exactly what those assignments entail.
Written papers:
Paper 1 is due on Sunday Sept. 23, midnight.
Here is your assignment:
You meet Tandelay O’Breckinridge, a high school senior visiting Penn, who brags about getting
a 5 on the AP Physics C Exam – perfect score. You act impressed, because you’re polite. But as
you walk away, you sort of wish you’d reacted differently. You’ve been reading Plato’s Meno,
Phaedo, and Republic very carefully for the past three weeks. You think Socrates would have
reacted differently. So… you go back to your dorm room and remind yourself of what the AP
Physics C Exam covers:
https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse/ap-physics-c-mechanics/about-the-exam
Then, you write up a Platonic dialogue (1500 words) in which Socrates cross-examines
Tandelay, and evaluates what Tandelay knows. You absolutely pack your dialogue with insight
into Plato’s ideas on knowledge, showing a thorough understanding of Plato’s views – then you
hand it in to your Prof.
Lab Reports:
Lab Report 1 due on Oct. 30, midnight.
This first report should be written in the style of a scientific research article published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. It should include the following headings:
Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and References. Include a
schematic methods figure, and 1-2 results figures, which can be single or multi-panel. The topic
of the research article should be a network analysis of the semantic network present in your
Paper 1 (see description above). After extracting the semenatic network from your paper, you
will analyze it using a network analysis toolbox (in MATLAB:
https://sites.google.com/site/bctnet/, in Python: https://networkx.github.io/, in R
http://igraph.org/redirect.html). For visualization, you might consider Gephi (https://gephi.org/).
IX. Grading:
The numerical score will be based on the following course components:
• Attendance and Class Participation: 20%
• Paper 1: 20%
• Paper 2: 20%
• Lab Report 1: 20%
• Lab Report 2: 20%
**Late Homework will graded as a 0.** The final letter grade will also take into account non-
numerical assessments of your command of the subject matter as evaluated by the professors.
X. Course Accommodations:
Students may request accommodation based on religious creed, disabilities, and other special
circumstances. Please make an appointment to discuss your request with Profs. Bassett &
Struck.
XI. Attendance and absences:
Attendance at lectures is required and counts towards the final grade as indicated above. Planned
absences must be arranged in advance with Profs. Bassett & Struck. For serious illness that
causes a student to miss a HW assignment, which is not communicated well in advance to the
professors, a note from Student Health Service will be required.
XII. Vision:
We (Bassett & Struck) are keen to discuss cutting edge thought in our own fields, but also to
learn from one another and from the discussion occurring in this class. The discussion occurring
in this class is likely to inform our research in the coming years, and we very much hope it also
changes the way each of you thinks about thinking.