Philosophy 1120 –
General Philosophy Office Hours: M W F, 10:20-11:20
Fall Semester 2006 Office: LC143S; Phone: 2604
Professor Tom Atchison Email: tatchison@gw.hamline.edu
Course Objectives
·
To introduce students to some of the questions
philosophers have traditionally asked (questions about what we know and how we
know it, about what is real, about what is valuable and about how we should
live) and to some of the answers they have proposed, and to see how these issues
bear on our current circumstances and way of life.
·
To introduce
students to some of the skills and methods used in philosophical inquiry,
skills and methods that may be useful in other sorts of inquiries as well. These include the ability to read a text
carefully, sympathetically and critically, the ability to analyze and criticize
arguments, and the ability to articulate one’s own views and to support them
with reasoned arguments.
Course Texts
The following books
are (or should be) available at the bookstore:
Simon Blackburn, Think; Plato, Five Dialogues; Rene
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy; David Hume, Inquiry
Concerning Human Understanding; John Locke, Second Treatise of
Government. Any other course
readings will be photocopied or will be available on the Internet. Please bring the text to be discussed to
class with you every time.
Class website
I maintain a simple website
where I post course handouts and information.
The URL is www.woldww.net/classes/. There
are notes and study questions posted there to help make sense of some of the
more difficult readings. I will also
post links to some assigned reading that is available online.
Course Description
Alfred
North Whitehead wrote (in his great work Process and Reality), “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” We will begin with Plato, studying several of
his shorter works. These will introduce us to the life and death of Plato’s
beloved teacher Socrates and to the activity of philosophical inquiry. Then
we will let Simon Blackburn guide us on a tour through some of the greatest
(short) hits of modern Western philosophy.
The works we study will deal with questions about what we can know and
how we can know it (including what, if anything, we can know about right and
wrong), what is real and what is merely appearance or illusion, what reasons
there are for believing (or disbelieving) in God, in miracles, in life after
death, and in free will and about the nature of the human mind and its relation
to our bodies. The later part of the
course will consider some fundamental questions of political philosophy. We will begin with another short classic
(John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government) and then consider how we
should understand and apply the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice in our
current circumstances.
I cannot promise we will answer any of these questions to your
satisfaction. They are, for the most
part, very difficult questions. What we
can hope to do is to learn something about how various historical and
contemporary thinkers have answered them, and to become somewhat more careful
and critical in our own efforts to answer them.
Conduct of the Course
Class time will
be devoted largely to discussion, some in small groups, some all together. I will occasionally 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. Often I will end the class with some remarks
intended to orient you to the next day’s reading.
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
struggling with these difficult texts is not only to understand what some great
minds have produced. A guided tour
through the
Assignments and Grading
I expect you to find time (an hour or two) 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, silly, 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.
Reading response papers
20 % of your
grade will be earned by submitting brief (1/4-1/2 of a double-spaced, typed
page, perhaps just a few sentences) responses to the readings for each
class. These must be turned in at the
beginning of the class period to be counted.
They can contain questions, objections, observations and/or reactions to
the reading for that class. Each
one should contain a brief statement of what you take to be the main point of the
reading assigned for that day. I will not grade these, but I will read them and will reject any
that do not seem to be based on a reasonably conscientious reading of the
assignment for that day. I will also notice and reward particularly perceptive
or thoughtful response papers. You can miss a few of these and still earn an
‘A’ for this part of the course work, but missing more than a few will be
penalized on the following schedule: 85% completed = A; 70% = B; 55% = C; 40% =
D; less than 40% = F.
Class discussion
Most weeks we
will have guided small group discussion projects. The purpose of these projects is to open
discussion and to focus it on particular issues. They are also intended to be
"mini-labs" in which to practice the skills of careful reading and
evaluation of reasoning. The projects
are done in class in groups of 3-5 and take roughly 20-45 minutes to
complete. Each group should keep notes
on its discussion, sign the notes and hand them in at the end of each class
session. Often groups will also report
orally on their discussions.
If you miss a
discussion project, you should get hold of the instructions, write out
responses to the questions on your own, and hand them in as soon as you
can.
10% 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.
Essays
You will be asked
to write two short (3-5 page) essays during the semester. Each paper will count for 17.5% of your
grade. Please keep copies of all the
work you hand in.
Exams
We will have two
one-hour, in-class exams -- one at mid-semester, one during the scheduled final
exam period. Each exam will count for 17.5%
of your grade.
Grading criteria
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 or not I agree with
your philosophical theories, ideas, or opinions.
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.
General Philosophy – Fall 2006 -- Schedule of assignments
|
Date to be discussed |
|
|
Wednesday, Sept.6 |
Introductory session |
|
Friday, Sept.8 |
No class – Faculty/Staff Convocation |
|
Monday, Sept.11 |
|
|
Wednesday, Sept.13 |
Plato, Apology |
|
Friday, Sept.15 |
Plato,
Crito |
|
Monday, Sept.18 |
Plato,
Meno |
|
Wednesday, Sept.20 |
Plato, Phaedo (1st half) |
|
Friday, Sept.22 |
Plato, Phaedo (2nd
half) |
|
Monday, Sept.26 |
Descartes, Meditations 1 and 2; |
|
Wednesday, Sept.27 |
|
|
Friday, Sept.29 |
Descartes, Meditation 3; |
|
Monday, Oct.2 |
Descartes, Meditation 4 (just through AT 54, i.e., the
first three paragraphs); |
|
Wednesday, Oct.4 |
|
|
Friday, Oct.6 |
|
|
Monday, Oct.9 |
Hume, Enquiry, Section XII |
|
Wednesday, Oct.11 |
Descartes, AT 78 and AT 86 in Meditation 6 (two paragraphs
containing arguments for the separateness of mind and body); |
|
Friday, Oct.13 |
|
|
Monday, Oct.16 |
|
|
Wednesday, Oct.18 |
Hume, Enquiry, Section VIII, "Of |
|
Friday, Oct.20 |
|
|
Monday, Oct.23 |
Review |
|
Wednesday, Oct.25 |
Mid-term
Exam |
|
Friday, Oct.27 |
No
class – Midterm Break |
|
Monday, Oct.30 |
|
|
Wednesday, Nov.1 |
|
|
Friday, Nov.3 |
|
|
Monday, Nov.6 |
Blackburn, Chapter 5, pp. 163-168; Hume, Enquiry, Section
XI, "Of Divine |
|
Wednesday, Nov.8 |
|
|
Friday, Nov.10 |
|
|
Monday, Nov.13 |
|
|
Wednesday, Nov.15 |
Article
on Immortality by D.Z.Phillips (Handout) |
|
Friday, Nov.17 |
Selections from Aristotle, Rousseau, and Burke justifying
inequality and hierarchical social relations |
|
Monday,
Nov.20 |
Selections
from Hobbes on the natural equality of ‘man’ |
|
Wednesday, Nov.22 |
Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapters II and III;
editor’s introduction, vii to xvi |
|
Friday, Nov.24 |
No class |
|
Monday, Nov.27 |
Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V; editor’s
introduction, xvi to xix |
|
Wednesday, Nov.29 |
Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapters IX and XI;
editor’s introduction, xix to xxi |
|
Friday, Dec.1 |
Selections from Equality by R. H. Tawney (online) |
|
Monday, Dec.4 |
"Equality, Value, and Merit" by F. A. Hayek
(online) |
|
Wednesday, Dec.6 |
"Rawls' Defense of the Liberal Democratic Welfare
State" by Stephen Nathanson (Handout) |
|
Friday, Dec.8 |
“After the Family Wage” by Nancy Fraser (handout) |
|
Monday, Dec.11 |
“Equality
in a Multicultural Society” by Bhikhu Parekh (handout) |
|
Wednesday, Dec.13 |
Review |
|
Wednesday, Dec.20, 10am-12 |
Final
Exam (in our regular classroom) for section 2 |
|
Tuesday, Dec.19, 2:45-4:45 |
Final
Exam (in our regular classroom) for section 3 |