Featured Courses

The curriculum is renewed and updated each academic year. On this page, you can find a representative selection of courses offered in the program. For your convenience, complete syllabi for all courses taught during the current year are available for viewing on the Class Schedule page.

Philosophical Foundations for Science, Technology and Society Students
Dr. Noam Yoran

What constitutes knowledge? What is truth? What distinguishes scientific knowledge from other forms of knowledge, and what is its relationship to technology? How might we explain science as a social endeavor? In what sense can social knowledge claim truth? What position do science and technology occupy in modern society's worldview? These represent just a few of the fundamental questions we explore in this course through key texts in epistemology, philosophy of science, and STS. The course is structured around three pivotal shifts in the philosophy of science.

In the first section, we examine efforts to validate science through the rationalism-empiricism debate from the Scientific Revolution forward, engaging with works by Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Popper, and Duhem. The second section addresses the linguistic turn in philosophy of science. Through readings of Carnap, Ayer, Quine, and others, we investigate the implications of recognizing truth as inseparable from its linguistic expression. The third section explores the historical turn in science studies, culminating with Kuhn's work. We consider the significance of historical perspectives on science and their influence on our understanding of scientific inquiry.

The final section introduces the social turn in science studies and establishes the foundations of STS as a discipline. Examining works by Latour, Daston, Bloor, and Veblen, we analyze science as a social project. We investigate how this perspective challenges beliefs in science's truth value and examine the complex interrelationship between science and culture.

Techno-Optimism and Techno-Pessimism
Dr. Ido Hartogsohn

This course examines two contrasting currents in contemporary culture: on one hand, the faith in technology as the foundation for progress, prosperity, and happiness; on the other, the fear of technology and the tendency to view it as a destructive force that undermines humanity and degrades culture. The course traces various techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic movements and thinkers across historical periods, investigating key questions including: How and why do technologies trigger human fear and hope? What common characteristics define techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic thought? What makes these perspectives compelling? And ultimately, how might we move beyond the limitations of both techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic frameworks?

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Boaz Tamir

The course begins with a historical and philosophical introduction that includes discussions on artificial intelligence myths, basic definitions, early artificial intelligence algorithms from the mid-twentieth century, the Turing test, and more. From there, the discussion moves to the pillars of modern theory, including: Machine learning, Neural networks, Reinforcement Learning, Graphical models and Bayesian networks, and Genetic algorithms. For each of these topics, the basic concepts, research methods, challenges, and open questions will be presented.

The Culture of Money
Dr. Noam Yoran

Cultural representations of money differ markedly from its standard economic conception. Rather than depicting it as a neutral medium, culture frequently portrays money as a pathological object, emphasizing the fantasies surrounding it and its entanglements with social relationships and personal obsessions. This course is founded on the premise that these cultural representations encode genuine knowledge about money that should be understood in broader economic terms. To this end, we examine money from diverse perspectives including mainstream and alternative economic thought, art and literature, the sociology and anthropology of money, the history of capitalism, and literary criticism. Together, these perspectives will help us address the course's central objective: to understand money as a social technology.

Screen Life: Medium and History
Dr. Noam Yoran

McLuhan's expression "the medium is the message" and his conception of media as "extensions of man" highlight the challenges involved in deciphering the interplay between media and history. They suggest that the most significant implications of the emergence of new media types are precisely those hidden from the view of people immersed in them. The most important effects of media on humans and societies are those that are transparent and taken for granted.

The course examines visual media from the 19th to the 21st century, focusing on how they reshape social and political forms and worldviews. We explore how photography, cinema, television, and new media have maintained different forms of being together, different relationships with others, different forms of subjectivity, and different imaginings of the world and communities.

In an era when media seem to be converging, we invest effort in conceptually distinguishing between screens in terms of their aesthetics, temporal dimension, ontological and social aspects. To this end, we pay special attention to moments of birth of a new medium, and to moments of confrontation between media. These are the typical moments when a medium loses its transparency: moments when they are still not or no longer the self-evident background of our reality.

Writing Workshop: Fundamentals
Professor Oren Harman

Do you see yourselves as memory physicians, as archaeologists of human past, as lock-pickers opening locks to discover hidden treasures, as artists? Perhaps you are psychologists at heart, or sociologists, detectives carefully tracking shy facts. And why the pursuit of your given project: what is its relevance, and why should we be interested? In this writing workshop, second-year graduate students beginning to work on their projects will be challenged to sharpen their arguments, consider the connections between themselves and their research, and work consciously on improving their skill.

The Quantum Revolution: From Basic Ideas and Concepts to the Quantum Computer
Dr. Boaz Tamir

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the most important scientific revolution in twentieth-century physics: quantum theory. The course presents quantum theory against the backdrop of Newtonian mechanism of the late nineteenth century in order to clarify the change this theory brought to our understanding of nature, the concept of scientific explanation, the role of science as a discipline describing nature, and the appropriate scientific methodology. The course presents the difficult philosophical questions arising from the theory regarding the nature of reality, alongside the theory's tremendous successes in precise prediction. The course also introduces one of the technological breakthroughs of recent years, the quantum computer.

History of Science: From Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution & From the Scientific Revolution to the 21st Century Dr. Ruly Belfer

These two courses together constitute the annual introduction to the history of science, part of our core curriculum. This intensive course presents the development of Western science, from its origins to its current state. Such an introduction encompasses the major topics, from the great ancient philosophers to influential theories and experiments of modern science. To fully appreciate the historical perspective on science, we will explore classic scientific issues in their social and intellectual context. As part of the STS Master's program, we develop the various questions and methods that guide historical research of science and technology, in relation to culture, identity, and religion. What makes science so fascinating is its change and development, the different approaches taken to understand the world. We will address slow evolution and game-changing revolutions, the relationship between technology and science, and the relationship between conceptual systems and the experimental-practical aspect of science.

Course Title: Artificial Horizons: The Human Encounter with Intelligence
Dr. Ido Hartogsohn

Recent developments in artificial intelligence have commanded global attention. Thought leaders and intellectuals have argued that these developments represent a paradigm shift, comparing the emergence of artificial intelligence to the discovery of fire or the invention of printing: a technology that will fundamentally transform and redefine human existence. A vast spectrum of predictions surrounds the dramatic changes this new technology might herald—ranging from utopian visions of post-capitalist abundance to dystopian scenarios of lost human agency and meaning, and even apocalyptic forecasts of humanity's end.

How should we interpret the wild diversity of visions that artificial intelligence generates? How do these various prophecies reflect the techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic frameworks prevalent in our society? In what ways does the response to artificial intelligence parallel or diverge from reactions to past technologies like the telegraph, radio, and internet, and what lessons can we draw from these historical precedents?

Throughout this course, we will examine the major discourses artificial intelligence is generating and the cultural values embedded within them, while acknowledging the interpretive flexibility and uncertainty inherent to the field. We will explore questions such as: How do cultural representations of AI systems shape public discourse? What relationships are emerging between humans and AI systems, and how might they transform concepts of intimacy, trust, and human connection? Is there substance to promises of a post-capitalist AI utopia, and how does a technology's meaning depend on its associated political and economic frameworks? Should our focus be on immediate AI dangers or on speculative yet potentially catastrophic threats like the alignment problem? How will AI systems reshape writing, thinking, reality perception, and human meaning? What insights can technological history offer about our present moment? And which ethical questions demand our urgent attention?

The theoretical classroom discussions will be complemented by hands-on experiences with AI tools—designed to foster intimate familiarity and deeper understanding of AI's possibilities, limitations, and challenges—and writing exercises that encourage critical thinking and well-reasoned positions on the topics discussed.

echnology and Consciousness
Dr. Ido Hartogsohn

This course examines a fundamental question in the study of technology and media: how does technology shape our consciousness? To what extent is our perception of the world a product of consciousness being shaped by media and technology? The course is grounded in the theoretical field known as media ecology and examines a wide range of technological communication means, including writing, numbers, agriculture, time, money, transportation, medicine, radio, computers, and smartphones. Recognizing the comprehensive nature of media, students embark on a journey through the history of technology, which is also a journey through the history of consciousness, examining the complex connections between technology and consciousness, and asking the crucial question: how has human consciousness changed throughout history with the development of technology?

Scientific Biographies
Professor Oren Harman

Scientific biography is a genre with its own history, teaching us much about the changes in our perceptions of science, knowledge, truth, and art over time. Through reading biographies of scientists from various fields—physics, mathematics, biology, geology, astronomy, medicine—and from different periods, we will examine in depth the art and technique of biography, and its changing historical contexts. We will encounter figures such as Pythagoras, Descartes, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Marie and Pierre Curie, Barbara McClintock, and George Price. Through literature, plays, films, and art, we will see how biographies of scientists have evolved and why this is significant for the history of science. The course will also deal with biographies of a different kind—of ideas, objects, diseases, and equations. Here we will meet Lonesome George the Galapagos tortoise, E=mc², H₂O, cancer, mitochondria, and even objectivity itself.

Reading Darwin in the 21st Century
Professor Oren Harman

It seems we all love Darwin, but do we really know him? And to what extent have we internalized his ideas? With 21st-century glasses, we will return to Darwin's 19th-century writings to understand how biology has evolved over time. We will look closely at concepts such as "variation," "heredity," "adaptation," "natural selection," "species," "race," "altruism," "sexual selection," "development," and others, and ask how our understanding has changed and why. By mapping the way ideas are born and transform over time, we will examine the complex and fascinating ways in which sociology, philosophy, history, and technology influence and inform one another. By the end of the course, we should all be more informed Darwinists.

Social Networks: Politics, Sex, and Emotion
Dr. Noam Yoran

This course will be conducted as a guided reading of contemporary texts focusing on social networks. The course will run for two semesters, and students may register for either one separately or both together.

Social networks have, in a relatively short time, brought about profound and not entirely understood changes in social, economic, and political reality. These changes remain unclear to us due to the wide gap between the expectations that accompanied the rise of networks and the effects they have generated.

Social networks were initially perceived as a promise of pluralism and multiplicity. This seemed a logical forecast, given the decentralized nature of networks and the possibilities for self-expression they created. Nevertheless, two decades later, many believe that social networks play a decisive role in creating political polarization and in the rise of populism and new types of authoritarian regimes. Simultaneously, social networks were seen as part of an economic decentralization trend, but have transformed into enormous monopolies.

In this course, we will focus on the special nature of political, emotional, and erotic expression on social networks. We will particularly concentrate on the interrelationships between these domains: how sexuality and emotional life become subjects of a new politics, and how sexuality and emotions drive political discourse.

One of many studies on polarization in the United States discovered a sharp jump in the percentage of parents who claim they would oppose their children marrying partners from the opposing political camp. This data is symptomatic of a deep change in the political world, which many associate with the rise of social networks. It is a kind of inversion of the old radical slogan "the personal is political." The slogan had a revolutionary meaning when it aimed to expose a hidden political dimension in seemingly non-political domains, such as the household and gender relations. In its new incarnation, it is actually related to political paralysis and the undermining of the possibility of dialogue between political camps. On social networks, the personal is political when every aspect of life – tastes, clothing, style of expression – can become a political statement or a focus for political hostility.

In the course, we will read works dealing with the connection between social networks and political populism, cancel culture, the #MeToo movement, polarization, political emotions, sexual culture in the digital world, and more. The various topics are intertwined, but in the first semester we will focus more on the political aspect of networks, and in the second, we will focus more on sexual and emotional aspects.

Persons, Actors, Agents: from Aquinas intellectus agens to actor-networks and AI agents

Professor Denisa Kera

The course will explore the concepts of personhood, actor, and agency across various disciplines, including law, theater, and philosophy. Students will examine historical and contemporary perspectives on agency, particularly in relation to AI and non-human entities. The discussions will trace intellectual developments from medieval theories of free will to modern principles of vitalism and cybernetics, critically assessing the implications of extending personhood and agency to AI in our current legal and ethical frameworks. This inquiry into the concept of agency will provide a foundational understanding of how historical concepts influence contemporary debates on natural persons, AI agency, and rights.

Design methods in Science, Technology and Society studies

Professor Denisa Kera

STS and design research share common themes of democratization and public engagement in science and technology along the challenges of "post-normal" science, which include "boundary objects," "wicked problems," and complex social-material and onto-political issues (hyperobjects, the stack, assemblages, actor networks). We can call them "post-ELSI" challenges because they involve multiple stakeholders, scales, units as well as macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analysis. They not only identify the "ethical, legal, and social" issues and implications of science and technology (ELSI paradigm), but also emphasize the urgency of linking critical thinking with a call to action, theoretical insights with practice, and policy with design. In this course, we will explore the various ways in which we can apply design methods and research in the STS context and use STS insights to improve design practice. While STS strengthens reflection and critical distance, design offers experimental methods to operationalize various concepts of agency and materiality. The combination of design and STS thus defines an approach that works across different "scales" (from human to non-human - planetary, molecular, mineral) and helps us test different concepts of the whole (stacks, hyperobjects, cosmopolitics, actor networks, assemblages, etc