One of the movements in contemporary general education is to embrace “The Big Questions.” This immediately raises a meta-question: What are the Big Questions? One approach is to convene a panel of people with a range of backgrounds, feed them a lot of coffee, and brainstorm. I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds like a pretty bad idea. So instead, I programmed a web crawler to search the course catalogs of a bunch of colleges and universities and suck out all the sentences ending with a “?”. Within a few minutes, I had about a thousand questions. Below is an almost random selection of one hundred questions from that list.
Note: this is a small part of a much larger project. Stay tuned.
- Am I a body, or do I have one?
- Are there incompatible but equally true ways of describing the world?
- Are we justified in eating animals?
- Can a society modernize yet preserve its cultural identity?
- Can nature be evil, or is all evil attributable to the freely willed actions of human beings?
- Can wars ever be started justly?
- Can we reasonably argue that some poems are good and some are bad?
- Do humans have unique responsibilities toward the natural world and if so, what are they?
- Do their genes make boys better at math?
- Does art play a significant role in the validation of social norms?
- Does justice require an equitable distribution of power, and of economic resources?
- How and why do various nationalisms lead to ethnic cleansing?
- How are new immigrants and their children being incorporated into the US?
- How are theological questions posed and answered?
- How can human rights rhetoric be criticized?
- How can war be avoided?
- How can you be sure that your decisions are not biased?
- How did Christians come to depict God?
- How do advertisements, photography, and film document cultural change?
- How do children manage to learn language?
- How do empires end?
- How do historians interpret and debate the past?
- How do innovations reshape society and culture?
- How do languages develop?
- How do logic and language relate?
- How do power, knowledge, and freedom interrelate?
- How do stars work?
- How do we claim to know anything about the past at all?
- How do we evaluate art?
- How do we explain differences in socioeconomic status?
- How do women construct and inhabit their gendered and religious identities?
- How does human biology constrain and support human cognition?
- How does one arrive at knowledge of self, and what are the consequences of this knowledge for relationships with others?
- How does the art we do and the art we experience shape our identity?
- How does your brain control complex behaviors such as playing an instrument, throwing a baseball, or learning to dance?
- How has the size of the baby boom affected its economic well being?
- How have our understandings of nature changed?
- How is human freedom possible?
- How is that a work of art can have a meaning?
- How should one make moral choices?
- How should we respond to crime?
- How, and from where, does the desire to theorize gender emerge?
- In what sense (if any) does democracy reduce the probability of war?
- In what ways has pollution shaped society since the onset of the Industrial Revolution?
- Is Darwinism “just a theory”?
- Is democracy a human right?
- Is it possible to have scientific knowledge of human thought, feelings, behavior, social life and history?
- Is pleasure the only ultimate good?
- Is the Earth a common type of planet or some cosmic quirk?
- Is the good life the same for everyone?
- Is there something like an autonomous realm of beauty?
- If we are not talking about independent moral facts when we call an action wrong, what are we doing?
- Should wealthy states aid poorer states, and if so, how much?
- Under what social conditions does innovation emerge?
- What are black holes and how can they form?
- What are the effects of affirmative action?
- What are the historical roots of contemporary cultural conflict?
- What are the merits and flaws of capitalism?
- What are the origins of ethnic identity?
- What are the social functions of artists and scientists?
- What binds human beings to one another?
- What can we learn about the nature of reality and the ways that we humans have invented to discover how the world works?
- What constitutes a cultural group?
- What defines us and constructs us as individuals?
- What do we know about the origins of the human species, agriculture, cities, and civilization?
- What does it mean to be American?
- What does it mean truly to know something?
- What effects do government policies have on individual incentives?
- What happens if the state comes to be formed as an empire?
- What is a good life?
- What is democracy?
- What is free will?
- What is justice?
- What is life?
- What is mysticism and how important is it?
- What is poverty and who are the poor?
- What is the best way to live a moral life?
- What is the meaning of “sacred” and why is it important in our lives?
- What is the nature of the “self” or the “soul”?
- What is the relationship between economic growth and demand for environmental quality?
- What is the relationship between the rise of English and the rise of Chinese as global languages?
- What is the role of silence in matters of justice?
- What is the self?
- What kinds of individuals can live in modern cities?
- What makes human beings human?
- What produces political change?
- What should we eat?
- What value does literacy convey to individuals and cultures?
- What, if anything, defines contemporary conservative thinking?
- When is it rational to have a particular belief?
- Which aspects of household and family vary, and which are constant?
- Who gets to the top, how, and why?
- Who should pay for global environmental damage?
- Why are some countries rich and others poor?
- Why did sex evolve and what are its consequences?
- Why do states and peoples go to war?
- Why has Africa remained so poor for so long?
- Why is reproduction such a controversial subject in medicine as well as religious and cultural discourses more broadly?
- Why is there an outcry over genetically modified foods?
- Why should we value “free” speech?