Basic assignment: Write a 3-5 page (typed, double-spaced) paper explaining and supporting your position on some issue raised by one or more of the writers we have read.
Some guidelines:
1. Your paper should contain your thoughts and opinions, not just a summary of Descartes or Hume (or whoever). Tell me what you think, not just what other people have said.
2. Do, however, address the position and/or the arguments of at least one of the writers we have studied. Give references to their text to support your interpretation of their views.
3. Be sure that the question or issue your paper is addressing is clear and well focused.
4. Be sure that you have provided a clear statement of your position on that issue (or your answer to that question).
5.
In addition to explaining what you think, your
paper should contain reasons why you take the position you do. Your main job is to explain why a reasonable
person should agree with the opinion or position you are expressing.
6.
Include in your paper at least one statement of an
objection to your view and a reply to that objection. How might someone who disagreed with you criticize your
argument? And how can you respond to
that criticism?
7.
You are not required (or encouraged) to consult any
other sources besides those already assigned for class reading. If you do use any other sources, give them
credit for whatever you take from them: list them in a bibliography at the end
of your paper and give specific references for any ideas you have
borrowed.
Some possible topics:
The general requirement is that your topic should fall
within the scope of this course, i.e., it should address some philosophical
question about knowledge or inquiry.
1.
An all-purpose suggestion: Critically evaluate
something we read (or one important claim or argument from one of the works we
read).
2.
Whether Descartes is right to think that he has
provided ‘valid and considered reasons’ to doubt all his former beliefs.
3.
Whether the possibility that we are living in the
Matrix is helpful to Descartes’ project of doubt.
4. Whether any of the ‘media watchdog’ groups we looked at have a legitimate conception of what ‘fair and balanced’ news coverage is.
5. Whether or not it is fair to characterize the mainstream media in the US as having a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ (or whatever) bias. (If you write about this, be sure to clarify what you mean by ‘bias’ and what sort of evidence you think is relevant to showing that it does or doesn’t exist.)
6. Whether Schick and Vaughan are right to discount personal experience as a source of knowledge.
7. Whether they are right to discount faith or mystical experience as a source of knowledge.
8. Whether they are right to reject coherence as a criterion of knowledge.
9. Whether they are fair in their discussion of one or more ‘weird things’.
10. Whether Brian Fay is right in arguing that you don’t have to ‘be one to know one’.
11. Whether Hume is right to say that there is no rational justification for our belief that the future will be like the past.