To: Students in Philosophy 303 –
Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing, Summer 2002
From: Tom Atchison
Welcome!
This letter will tell you what you
need to do to get started with your independent study. I am not enclosing a complete syllabus. To receive a syllabus send an email to tomatchison@bigfoot.com,
and I will send you course materials by return email. (Put Phil 303 in the subject line of your email.)
Meanwhile you can, if you want,
get started on the first assignment. It
is:
- Rent
the film The Matrix from your favorite video store. Watch about the first half of it (at
least), through the part where Morpheus explains and demonstrates the how
the Matrix works. Think about what
it would take to convince you that you were living in the Matrix or some
such virtual reality device. Think
about how you know (or whether you do really know) that you are not living
in a virtual reality fed to you by someone else.
- Read
the first two of Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. These are available online in several
versions. My favorite version for
beginning students is one prepared by Jonathan Bennett. Professor Bennett has modernized
Descartes’ language, simplified the sentence structure, and inserted a
number of helpful comments. The URL is http://www-hl.syr.edu/phil/Bennett/Bennett_Descartes.htm.
- A
very helpful guide to the Meditations, written by Rae Langton of
the University of Edinburgh, is available at http://www.arts.ed.ac.uk/philosophy/study_html/vade_mecum/sections/section5/descart1.htm. I’d strongly recommend reading at least
the first part of this for background on Descartes and his social context.
- I
am enclosing study questions for Descartes’ first two meditations. Write out answers to questions #1, 3,
5, 7, 10, 13, 16, and 17 and send them to me by email.
Some other things you might like
to know:
- There
will be a web site for this course soon.
Unfortunately, I am in the process of changing ISP’s, and it will
be a few more days before my new service is up and running. So far, my old web site is still up
at http://www.users.qwest.net/~ac15/. There are links on the site to the
Descartes materials and to many other things connected with the theory of
knowledge. The versions of this
course on this site are not much like this independent study version,
however.
- There
will also be an email list and a requirement to participate in an online
discussion. Interaction is
essential to learning philosophy, so we will need to create a virtual
classroom.
- Three
books have been ordered and should be at the bookstore. (O’Hear, Introduction to the
Philosophy of Science; Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions; and Fay, Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science.) The other course readings (quite a lot)
will be made available on line (as in the assignment above). This course will be very inconvenient
for students who do not have good Internet access and the facilities to
read online materials or to print them out.
- The
reading and writing assignments for this course require a fairly high
degree of literacy. I have not
taught this course in this format before, so I don’t know for sure how it
will work out, but I strongly suspect that students whose English is not
very good, or whose reading and writing skills are shaky, would be better
off taking a classroom version instead of an independent study. I will try to be helpful with
electronic feedback, but I’m afraid it will not be an adequate substitute
for face-to--face communication for students who need a lot of help.