Murray Smith

I lead study groups at Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement.

The courses I have taught are listed below.  The more recent courses have websites which may be accessed in two ways.  Members of HILR may sign in to the Harvard course website, which allows them to download assigned and optional readings for the course.  Non-members may view a copy of the course webpages on this site but cannot download copyrighted material here.  Older courses can be viewed only on this site, because the member site is no longer maintained by Harvard due to a change in platform.  And the really old courses had no websites.

• Introduction to Linguistics (fall, 2025):  Members
• Artificial Intelligence: How Does It Know? (spring, 2024):  Members
• The First Half of History:  Before the Greeks (spring, 2023):  Members
• The Science of Genes and the Politics of Equity (spring, 2022):  Members
• The Brain (fall, 2020):  Members
• Ancient Genomes:  The New Science of the Human Past (with Dan McCarthy) (spring, 2019):  Members
• Postmodernism:  What Was That All About? (fall, 2018):  Members
• The Scientific Revolution, Experimentation, and Causation (fall, 2017):  Members
• The Origins of Novelty in Evolution (spring 2017):  Members
• How We Became Human (fall 2016):  Members
• Semantics (fall 2015)
• Mindreading (spring 2015)
• The Origins of Language (spring 2014)
• Language and Thought (fall 2013)
• Philosophy of Science (fall 2011)
• Linguistics 101 (fall 2010)
• Reality and Us:  Some Philosophical Questions (spring 2010)
• Language and Talk (fall 2009)
• Human Evolution (spring 2009)
• The Awakening in Ancient Greece (spring 2008)
• Cognitive Linguistics (fall 2007)
• The Thought of Richard Rorty (spring 2007)
• Historical Linguistics (fall 2006)
• Philosophy of Biology (spring 2006)
• The Evolutionary Origins of Religion (fall 2005)
• Sex, Virtue, and Darwin:  Understanding Mating and Morality through Evolutionary Psychology (spring 2005)