Syllabus – Philosophy 378                            Professor Tom Atchison 
Contemporary Philosophy                             Office:  312 St. John’s Hall (St. Paul Campus)
Spring Semester 2013                                      Office hours: M 2-5, T 5-7 and by appointment
                                                                        Office Phone: 651-793-1493
                                                                        Email: Thomas.Atchison@metrostate.edu                            
Course Objectives

• To learn something about the philosophical views, ideas, and arguments put forward by a variety of philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries
• To consider various interpretations and understandings of their works.
• To improve students’ ability to develop and defend interpretations of their own.
• To improve students’ ability to criticize and assess the views of these philosophers.
• To give students an opportunity to continue to develop their own philosophical views

Course Materials

A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic
Kenny, Ed., The Wittgenstein Reader
Talisse and Aiken, The Pragmatism Reader
Ingram and Ingram, Critical Theory: The Essential Readings
Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger
Oksala, How to Read Foucault
Frye, The Politics of Reality

Please bring the assigned reading to class with you each week.  (We will often spend a good deal of our class time looking at the texts.)

Please make sure your Metro State Netmail account is working and check regularly for class related emails.

Class website:  I maintain a simple website where I post course handouts and information.  The URL is http://www.woldww.net/classes/

Course Description
             At the beginning of the 20th century, philosophers in Europe and North America proclaimed a variety of allegedly revolutionary approaches to philosophy – approaches that claimed to leave old problems and methods behind and to put philosophy, at last, on a firm and proper footing.  In the US, James and Dewey rejected traditional philosophical problems in the name of pragmatism, a practical philosophy suited to a scientific and progressive era.  In Germany Husserl initiated an approach he called phenomenology, grounded in a close and unprejudiced description of experience, which, again, left the traditional problems behind and moved forward on a scientific basis.  In England and Austria, The logical atomists and their successors (logical positivists, logical empiricists, and ‘analytic’ philosophers generally) claimed that new developments in logic provided the tools to dissolve the traditional problems of philosophy and to take on a new role as clarifier of concepts and helpmate to natural science (which was the only method for discovering actual knowledge).  Finally, in Frankfurt, Germany, a new generation of Marxist philosophers, influenced also by Freud, rejected the kind of theory they called ‘traditional’ and developed what they took to be a new way of studying the social world: critical social theory.  This class will trace these four traditions through the 20th century and into the 21st.  Along the way we will see them conversing with one another; sometimes criticizing, sometimes coalescing.  We will also consider the relation of each tradition to feminism.

Conduct of the Course

            Class time will be devoted largely to discussion.  I will rarely lecture, more often I will answer questions as they come up in discussion, and even more often I will try to help you figure out how to answer your questions yourself. 
Much of our discussion will focus on understanding and evaluating the texts.  This will work well only if you have done the assigned reading carefully -- often twice or three times -- and given it some thought.  In philosophy we are interested not in the information that can be extracted from a text, nor simply in the conclusions or opinions that an author expresses; we are primarily interested in understanding and assessing the reasoning that an author uses to try to establish or support those conclusions.  This requires a very careful sort of reading. 
The point of reading these texts is not only to understand what some great minds have produced.  A guided tour through the Museum of Great Ideas is a very good thing, but not the best thing that philosophy has to offer.  Better is the opportunity to learn to think for yourself.  The readings provide models of careful and/or creative thinking, challenges to our prejudices and assumptions, and starting points for our own reflections.  But the only way to learn to philosophize is to enter the conversation yourself.  In this way a course in philosophy is more like a course in drawing or sculpture -- a studio art course -- than like a course in art history or art appreciation.  You can’t learn to draw by just watching other people draw, and you can’t learn to do philosophy by just listening and reading.  You have to express your views and expose them to other people’s critical reactions.   

Assignments and Grading

Reading assignments
I expect you to find time (several hours) to do the reading for each class and to come prepared to discuss it.  Come to class ready to say what you found interesting, what you found confusing, questionable, or just plain wrong, what seemed to you to be the most important claims made, and what arguments or justifications were offered for those claims.  Expect that you will need to read the assignments more than once to understand them adequately, and plan your time accordingly.

Reading response papers
30 % of your grade will be earned by submitting brief (a page or two, typed, double-spaced) responses to the readings for each class. These must be turned in at (or emailed by) the beginning of the class period to get full credit. Late papers get no more than 1/2 credit. If you must miss class, send in your response paper by e-mail. Each of these papers should contain: 1) a brief, concise statement of what you take to be the main point (or points) made in the reading) and 2) your questions, objections, observations and/or reactions to the reading for that class.

Class discussion
25% of your grade will also be determined by my evaluation of the quality of your participation in class discussions.  Just showing up and paying attention earns a C for this component; occasionally making helpful contributions earns a B; regularly making helpful contributions earns an A.  Helpful contributions include: asking pertinent questions, answering questions asked by the instructor or by other students, expressing your views about the texts or topics we are discussing, responding (relevantly and respectfully) to the views expressed by others.

Position Papers
Option 1:  You will write 3 short (4-6 page) papers explaining and supporting your position on an interpretive or substantive question arising from one or more of the texts we study.  I will provide topics for you to choose from. Each paper will count for 15% of your grade.  Due dates will be Feb. 27, April 3, and May 1
Option 2: You will write one longer paper (10-15 pages), due at the end of the semester (May 1).  You will need to submit a topic proposal on March 20 and a rough draft on April 10.  This paper will count for 45% of your grade

Note:  I try hard to base my evaluation of your work on your understanding of the reading, the quality of your reasoning and questioning, and the clarity and effectiveness of your expression of your thoughts, not on whether I agree with your philosophical theories, ideas, or opinions.

Time commitment outside of class
In accordance with Metropolitan State University guidelines, I've designed this course with the expectation that students will do 2-3 hours of course-related work outside of class for every hour spent in class.  In other words, you should expect to spend 6-9 hours a week outside of class working on this course. 

Needed reading and writing skills
Although there are no prerequisites for this course, it is an upper-division course.  This means I assume you have the following reading and writing skills, and assignments are made with this expectation in mind:

• Ability to read and summarize the main points of analytical, abstract material such as Supreme Court decisions and academic journal articles;
• Ability to include appropriate citations of quoted and paraphrased sources in academic writing;
• Ability to construct short, analytical essays including stating and supporting a thesis, presenting and addressing objections to your thesis, and drawing conclusion
• Ability to edit written work well enough to eliminate most errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling.

Course Policies

                       
Attendance
I do not require attendance per se, but part of your grade is determined by your participation in class discussion.  I strongly advise regular attendance because the material in this course is relatively difficult and confusing, and few students are able to do well on the exams and papers without the explanations and practice provided in class.

Late work
Response papers must be turned in at (or before) the beginning of class to receive full credit.  Late response papers will receive half credit. In fairness to students who turn their position papers in on time, I will subtract one grade (e.g., B+ to B) for each day that a postion paper is late.

Incompletes
I will give incomplete grades only to students who have satisfactorily completed most of the course work and who are unable to finish on time because of circumstances beyond their control.

Plagiarism
All work submitted for this course must be your own.  Plagiarism is the academic ‘sin’ of presenting someone else’s work as your own.  It is plagiarism if you copy something verbatim (word for word) from a published source, from the Internet, or from another student.  It is still plagiarism if you rearrange, paraphrase, condense, or summarize someone else’s work without making clear to your reader what is your contribution and what is taken from your source. If the exact wording comes from your source, then use quotation marks.  If the idea comes from someone else, give him or her credit for it. The way to do this is to cite your sources.  There is a clear and detailed explanation of various forms of plagiarism and of proper citation practices at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/02-1/plagiarism.html.  I will give a grade of ‘F’ to any student who submits plagiarized work for this course.   

Very tentative schedule of assignments      (See class website for details and updates.)

Due dates for writing assignments:

1.  Response papers are due every week
2.  Position papers:
            Option one: Short papers --  4-6 page papers due on Feb. 27, April 3, and May 1
            Option two:  Term Paper – proposal due on March 20, rough draft April 10, final draft May 1.