Philosophy 1120 –
General Philosophy Office Hours: M W F, 10:20-11:20
Spring Semester 2007 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.
Email
Email is
the best way to get in touch with me (better than leaving a message on my
voice-mail). I will also use the
University list-serves to send messages to the class from time to time with
schedule changes, reading notes, etc. Please
check your Hamline email regularly.
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, sometimes in small groups, mostly 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 emailed before
class or 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
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 – Spring, 2007 -- Schedule of assignments
Date to be discussed |
|
Wednesday, Jan. 31 |
Introductory session |
Friday, Feb. 2 |
|
Monday, Feb. 5 |
Plato, Euthyphro |
Wednesday. Feb. 7 |
Plato, Apology |
Friday, Feb. 19 |
Plato, Crito |
Monday, Feb. 12 |
Plato, Meno |
Wednesday, Feb. 14 |
|
Friday, Feb. 16 |
Plato, Phaedo (2nd half) |
Monday, Feb. 19 |
Descartes, Meditations 1 and 2; |
Wednesday, Feb. 21 |
|
Friday, Feb. 23 |
Descartes, Meditation 3; |
Monday, Feb. 26 |
Descartes, Meditation 4 (just through AT 54,
i.e., the first three paragraphs); |
Wednesday, Feb. 28 |
Descartes, AT 78 and AT 86 in
Meditation 6 (two paragraphs containing arguments for the separateness of
mind and body); |
Friday, March 2 |
|
Monday, March 5 |
|
Wednesday, March 7 |
Hume, Enquiry, Section VIII,
"Of |
Friday, March 9 |
|
Monday March 12 |
|
Wednesday, March 14 |
Review |
Friday, March 16 |
Mid-term Exam |
March 17-25 |
Spring Break |
Monday, March 26 |
|
Wednesday, March 28 |
|
Friday, March 30 |
Hume, Enquiry, Section XII |
Monday, April 2 |
|
Wednesday, April 4 |
Blackburn, Chapter 5, pp.
159-168 ; Hume, Enquiry, Section XI, "Of Divine |
Friday, April 6 |
No class |
Monday, April 9 |
|
Wednesday, April 11 |
|
Friday, April 13 |
|
Monday, April 16 |
Selections from Aristotle and Burke
justifying inequality and hierarchical social relations (online) |
Wednesday,
April 18 |
Selections from Hobbes
(online) |
Friday,
April 20 |
Locke, Second Treatise of
Government, Chapters II and III; editor’s introduction, vii to xvi |
Monday,
April 23 |
Locke, Second Treatise of
Government, Chapter V; editor’s introduction, xvi to xix |
Wednesday,
April 25 |
Locke, Second Treatise of
Government, Chapters IX and XI; editor’s introduction, xix to xxi |
Friday,
April 27 |
"Equality, Value, and Merit" by F. A. Hayek (online) |
Monday,
April 30 |
Selections from Equality by R. H. Tawney (online) |
Wednesday,
May 2 |
"Rawls' Defense of the Liberal Democratic Welfare State" by Stephen Nathanson (Handout) |
Friday,
May 4 |
Locke, Second Treatise of
Government, Sections 77-82 (pp. 42-44) Selections from Rousseau,
and notes on Mill (from the University of Middlesex (UK) |
Monday,
May 7 |
“After the Family Wage” by Nancy Fraser (online) |
Wednesday,
May 9 |
“Equality
in a Multicultural Society” by Bhikhu Parekh (handout) |
Friday,
May 11 |
Review
|
Wednesday, May 16, 10:00AM |
Final Exam (in our regular classroom) for section
5 (which normally meets at 11:30) |
Tuesday,
May 15, 2:45PM |
Final Exam (in our regular classroom) for section 6 (which normally meets at 12:40) |