About the Course

  In this course, you will learn how to make meaning from your experience.
    

I realize that sounds both presumptious and vague. But hear me out. Meaning is relationship--connections. Where you can find connections, you will find meaning. So your progress through this course will consist of taking raw, perhaps confusing experiences, and making them into focal points of meaning in your life by making connections. The experiences we will be working with will in part be the experiences of reading the works of great philosophers from times and cultures that differ greatly from your own. You will read passages of some of the most influential writers of Western Civilization: from ancient Greece, from ancient Rome, and from medieval Europe. Many of these passages will contain unfamiliar vocabulary, refer to historical events or persons you've never heard of, and draw upon background assumptions that are not any part of your own background. At first, you can expect that your experience of these readings will be close to meaningless. But with work, research, discussion, patience, and great effort, each reading can become meaningful and of priceless value to you. I emphasize the word "can" because nothing I do will make that happpen for you. It is entirely your choice and hence your responsibility. If you leave the course no wiser than before, you have failed, regardless of the grade you have received. I'm here to help everyone who chooses not to fail.
     

This effort to read and to understand difficult and new concepts will require much effort from you. You cannot simply sit back and absorb the wisdom that pours from my lips. The idea is to engage you in a learning experience, and so the focus is on your learning, not on my teaching. Much reading will be required of you. You should expect to be reading for at least six hours a week for this course outside of the classroom. If you cannot manage that amount of time, then you should drop the class and take it again when your schedule permits.
    

But reading and understanding these great works is only part of what the course is about. The core textbook, From Experience to Meaning, is an analysis of the process of meaning-making--in all areas of our lives. So, while we are reading the great philosophical writings of the past, we will also be reflecting on what we are doing as we make meaning of those writings: that is, on the process of making meaning.

    I will assess your progress through some objective tests (over the content of the reading), and a term paper, but mostly through class discussions and through your "experience blogs," which you will keep throughout the semester. These blogs will be posted on your own personal forum on BlackBoard. At the end of the semester, I hope to show a movie in class, and you should be able to confirm that the work you have done during the semester, though not in any way involving the experience of movie-watching, has had an important impact on what you do with the experience presented to you while making sense of a movie.

Goals and Objectives

This course explores foundational questions about human existence and a human being’s relationship to reality. Students will begin by focusing on a person’s natural inclination to wonder, and on how inquiry moves persons to find intelligible meaning in experiences. They proceed by examining the basic structure of conscious activity, which allows them to discover what they are doing when they are experiencing, understanding, knowing, and deciding. The goal of this analysis is students’ critical self-appropriation of their own natures as knowers and doers. The course introduces the students to the origins of such systematic and critical self-appropriation in ancient Greece, in the philosophical activities of Socrates and Plato. It explores how the most basic and overarching questions about human existence that were asked by the first philosophers are still those that must be asked if people are to penetrate below the facts of everyday life to think deeply about what is real, true, valuable, just, and meaningful in human life. They include such questions as: Who am I? What is real? Can I know what is truly worthwhile? Does God exist? Does history have a meaning? What is justice? Thus the course examines how critical self-reflection illuminates human and humane living in a way crucial to personal development.

By the end of this course, students shall...

(1) Understand and discuss the embeddedness of all human consciousness in concrete, embodied, historical experience.
(2) Understand and discuss the process of meaning-making as a uniquely and universally human activity.
(3) Be able to explain what knowledge is and how a person comes to know.
(4) Understand and discuss how human freedom springs from self-reflexive consciousness and thus makes one responsible for one’s experience.
(5) Understand and discuss the significance of one’s relationship to transcendent reality and the community of spirit and, particularly, the consequences of denying such reality.
(6) Interpret texts in light of their historical, critical, and personal meanings.

About philosophy courses in general

   

This course is not a free-form opinion-fest.  We will be dealing with topics that may strike you as purely personal--ideas that may at first seem to be simply matters of taste.  You may, therefore, mistakenly assume that your opinion about these matters is just as good as anyone else's, or that there is nothing objective to say about some of these issues.  Or worse, you may think that the grade you get is based on my own prejudices and beliefs and thus is purely arbitrary.  You may at first be discouraged by the fact that some of the questions we study have been debated for centuries. 

    Let me address these concerns right now.  One opinion is not always as good as another.  Some opinions are justified and some are not.  Opinions that are supported by evidence and by reasoning are always better than those that are simply claimed or asserted for no reason at all.  Bald assertions may nonetheless be true, I'll admit, and closely-reasoned conclusions may nonetheless be false, but the truth of an opinion is only one of the factors that determine how good the opinion is.  After all, a true but irrational opinion is just a lucky guess.  We are mere humans, and our knowledge is limited.  So, from our own perspective, the reasoning that supports an opinion is always very important.  Though not a guarantee of absolute truth, careful reasoning is insurance against stupid blunders.  Evaluating the reasoning that supports our thinking lets us separate the likely from the unlikely opinions.

    The above thoughts should explain many things about this class that are different from other classes you have taken.  Firstly, many of the questions I raise will have more than one acceptable answer (as well as many unacceptable ones).  Your answer to a question is less important to me than the way you reach or defend that answer.  Secondly, even if I do ask you to make a judgment in a matter of taste, you should be able to explain, justify, and defend your opinion by appealing to relevant and cogent evidence.  You should understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own opinion.  You should be willing to revise it if new evidence comes to light.  You should be open to persuasion by good evidence, but resistant to persuasion by sophistry or faulty arguments.  Third, when I grade you, I will focus on how well-reasoned your conclusions are, not on whether you "agree" with me.  If you think that you have received an arbitrary grade, please ask me about it.  I want to be as objective and fair as possible, but I can make mistakes.  I will gladly reconsider any grade if you can show me that I missed or misinterpreted something.  And finally, the lack of universal agreement on an answer to a philosophical question, such as "does life have meaning?" only means that there is still much to explore.  Think of thinking as an art like painting.  People have painted landscapes for many centuries, but there will always be room for another one.  Philosophy, like art, will never be over. My goal here is to teach you to think well, not to teach you the right thoughts to think; though we can hope that the better you think, the more your thoughts will be right in areas where "right" and "wrong" make sense, and the wiser they will be in other areas.

Your grade

My Manifesto

I hate grades. Learning is not about grades. I would prefer that the issue of grades never come up. You should be here to learn, and I'm here to help you do that. The grades only matter to people who aren't in the class--administrators, financial aid officers, and so forth. But because they care about them, we have to take them seriously. So study week and finals week take away two precious weeks during which you could be learning. The mid-semester exam and the study day I allot for it steals yet another week from your education.

As far as you are concerned, you have a good idea of whether you're understanding the material or not. And if we talk with each other enough, I will know, too. Often, we will agree about whether or not you understand. Ideally, you should not move on to the next reading until you and I are both satisfied with what you have learned. Ideally, every student should progress as far and as fast as he or she can. But, unfortunately, we are slaves to the schedule. That means that we will sometimes have to move on before you are ready. I regret that, but it is the system. It only becomes serious when moving on too early becomes the norm, rather than the exception. We need to be attentive to your own understanding so that we can catch that downward slide before it gains momentum. So please, please, please come talk with me if you need help or if you just want to discuss the class or readings.

Your grade will be based on the following data:

• Reading blogs (40%)
• Self-evaluation (5%)
• Class participation (15%)
• Mid-Semester Exam (20%)
• Final Exam (20%)

Some explanations:

Each weekly entry in your reading blog is to be posted on a bulletin board I will set up for you on Blackboard. In it,you are to put into words your reflections on the readings for that week. These blog entries are due before the class in which we discuss the reading. The intent of this assignment is to keep me informed of your progress in this course. If you are honest and articulate, I don't need any form of testing or assessment to know how well you are doing in this course--where your strengths and weaknesses are. If you are evasive and lazy, then I have no clue, but can guess. So keep in mind my intent as you post your entries. In the second or third week, we do an in-class exercise that will help you understand better what I am looking for.

The blog entry is not a book report or summary. It is your own reflection on the issues raised in the chapter. This can include questions, challenges, observations (either supportive or contrary), emotional reactions, or whatever else will reveal your active engagement with the text. I will look for the following six characteristics of your blog entries:

1. Basic comprehension (Do you understand the author's main assertions?);
2. Deep comprehension (Do you understand the reasons the author presents for his or her assertions?);
3. Insight (Have you made connections between the author's claims and your own life or with something else, like movies, news, or literature?);
4. Curiosity (Do you raise puzzles or questions about the claims made by the author?);
5. Critical thinking (Have you raised interesting challenges for the author to meet?);
6. Truth-seeking (Have you shown an effort to respond to the objections you raised to the author as the author might respond, and then tried to reach a balanced judgment that takes all relevant issues into account?).

Self-evaluation. At the beginning of the semester, you will be asked to draw up a brief description of your personal goals for the course. At the end of the semester, you will submit a 1-2 page self-evaluation in which you revisit those goals and reflect upon the extent to which the goals have been met and/or changed and the processes by which such learning has taken place. More details on the structure and content of the self-evaluations will be distributed later in the course.

Class participation does not mean saying "here" when I call the roll. It means asking questions, raising objections, offering insights, and constructively interacting with me or with other students in the classroom. I do not make a habit of randomly calling on people in class, so don't worry about that. Your participation is up to you. If you are shy, this is going to be a problem. You will simple have to force yourself to say something every now and then. If you are more than a little shy, that is, if the prospect of saying something in a group is actually terrifying, then visit me in my office and let me know about it early.

The mid-term and final will be multiple-choice exams. Their purpose is to give you a chance to review what we've done up to that point. Expect about thirty multiple-choice questions on each of these exams.

Your Responsibilities
 

• READ THE ASSIGNMENTS!!!  More than half of the content of this course is in the readings. There will be class discussion about each reading, in which everyone will participate. Tests will always cover at least some points from the reading that we did not touch on in class.
• READ THE ASSIGNMENTS AGAIN!!!  I can't fully understand any of these readings from a single reading, so I don't expect you to be able to do so either. Read each one at least twice. The first time, take critical notes (mark up the book with analytic and challenging comments). The second time, look for answers to your first challenges, look for inconsistencies that you didn't notice at first, and write down questions or observations to bring up in class. If you cannot devote six hours per week to studying for this class, you should withdraw. If you can devote six hours per week, you should.
• ATTEND CLASS.  The remaining content of this course is in-class lecture and discussion.  We will cover a lot of ground in each session.  If you miss a single class, you will be almost certain of missing some questions on the exams.

• DO NOT USE TECHNOLOGIES IN CLASS UNLESS DIRECTLY RELEVANT TO CLASS ACTIVITIES AT THAT MOMENT. This class requires your full attention and participation. Surfing the Internet, answering emails, messaging friends, tweeting, and other such activities not only remove you from the classroom but distract everyone around you and deliver a direct personal insult to me. I do take great offense to any such acts of rudeness, though I may not mention it aloud.

• TAKE GOOD NOTES. Very few students know how to take good notes before their Junior year. But anyone who does take good notes could simply read them over before a major test and make a 100. Good notes do not simply list the topics or examples mentioned in class. Good notes always consist of complete sentences or paragraphs that summarize what is said or done. You should write down, in full, every major point made during any class. You should also take notes on your reading. Note taking and blogging are not incompatible activities.

• TURN IN ALL WORK ON TIME. I will not always remind you of due dates coming up or past. You must keep track of these things yourself.

• BE HONEST (DON'T CHEAT).  It may seem insane to have to say this to responsible adults like you, but I'm saying it. So listen up! Cheating in any form is totally unacceptable.  If you cheat, you will fail my course, and I will turn your name in to the Dean. Dishonesty comes in many forms, but one form is called "plagiarism," which means borrowing words or ideas from someone else, and pretending they are yours. Every word that goes into a paper or that goes into a blog entry must be your own. Do not--I repeat DO NOT--take the words of anyone else and copy them into your paper or blog. Borrowing someone else's thinking is not research, it's cheating—even if you list the real author in a bibliography.

 

Calendar for Fall, 2010
SSU=The Search for Self-Understanding Plato=The Last Days of Socrates Boethius=The Consolation of Philosophy Lucretius=On The Nature of Things A blog entry for each reading is due BEFORE CLASS on the day listed.
Week	Dates	Readings	Tests and Topics
1	8/24	No reading	Syllabus and course
	8/26	SSU: Chapter One	About philosophy The beginnings of philosophy
2	8/31	Plato: "Euthyphro"	Curiosity and questioning
	9/2	Euthyphro continued (No reading)	"Definition"--what is it?
3	9/7	SSU: Chapter Two	Importance of meaning " World" versus "reality"
	9/9	Plato: "Apology"	"Dialectic" The examined life
4	9/14	SSU: Chapter Three	Figuring things out Natural philosophy Epicurus
	9/16	Lucretius: Book I, line 1-829
5	9/21	Lucretius: Book I, line 830 - Book II, line 477
	9/23	Lucretius: Book II, line 478 - 1174
6	9/28	Lucretius: Book III, lines 1-829
	9/30	Lucretius: Book III, lines 830-1094
7	10/5	Review for exam
	10/7	Mid-Semester Exam
8	10/12	Go over Exam (No reading)
	10/14	SSU: Chapter Four
9	10/19	Preview of Boethius (No reading)	The meaning of life
	10/21	Boethius: Book 1
10	10/26	Boethius: Book 2	The wheel of fortune
	10/28	(continued)
11	11/2	Boethius: Book 3	False happiness and true happiness
	11/4	(continued)
12	11/9	Boethius: Book 4	The problem of evil
	11/11	(continued)
13	11/16	Boethius: Book 5	Chance, necessity, providence, free will
	11/18	(continued)
14	11/23	SSU: Chapter Five	Putting it all together
	11/25	Thanksgiving Break
15	11/30	Movie--first half--Meet in Media Viewing Room (library)
	12/2	Movie--second half
16	12/7	Course assessments Study Week
	12/9
17	12/14	Final Exam Tuesday 3:15pm--5:00pm