Post your philosophy syllabus

[Aces McGee]

I gather that there are at least a few philosophy college students frequenting this forum. Post your philosophy syllabi, so us former philosophy students have something to read.

-McGee

[soko]

You should read my new book titled: "<u>Get A Life.</u>"

Just kidding.

In all seriousness, I found an intereting link that might have what you're looking for:

linky (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=philosophy+syllabus+&amp;btnG=Google+Se arch)


(are you really expecting people to type their whole syllabus up for this thread?)

[Aces McGee]

[ QUOTE ]
(are you really expecting people to type their whole syllabus up for this thread?)

[/ QUOTE ]

I originally typed up my post with the phrase "This may be stupid." I guess I should've left it in.

Good point about the Google search, I hadn't thought of that. I guess the one thing that my thread might accomplish would be discussion of what the kids are studying these days.

Anyway, probably a bad thread.

-McGee

[Philo]

Aces--let me know what areas of philosophy you're interested in and I'll give you some references.

[Jshuttlesworth]

In my intro clas, we are reading "The Problem of Evil" (ed. Marilyn Adams), Platos's "Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo," and Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics."

[bearly]

aces, in response to your question about what the kids are studying today--i think that is virtually unanswerable. of course, i am referring to the omnipresence of the internet. a young person willing to hire a competent tutor, and selecting their classes carefully, should be able to complete an undergraduate major in philosophy while putting in no more that 5 hours a week (for 4 years). the internet is not only a zillion volumne set of "cliff's notes", but w/ only a slight bit of ability, term papers are a 4 hr cut-and-paste job. of course, graduate school will bring the student's lack of real training to the surface, and that is about the time they will go into dad or mom's business, or get a job in "public administration" where people who claim they were educated as "thinkers" congregate.......b

[aeest400]

This post is a non sequiter. The question was about philosophy syllabi, not what people are studying today or how lazy many students are. There are many great sources for philosophy on the net. Google is your friend. Having taught some philosophy classes, I assure you that people cannot breeze through them at any reputable school. Philosopher have a friend that is foreign to many other college departments, it's called the "C." In my experience it is very easy, even with lower division classes, to separate the wheat from the chaff. Upper division classes are used to separate the good wheat from the better wheat (folks not interested in thinking and studying generally do not take upper division phil classes). By the way, philosophy students tend to score the highest marks on the medical school (MCAT) and law school (LSAT) admission tests. It is not a course of study for freerollers.

If OP has questions about recommendations in specific areas of philosophy and purpose (breadth, depth, modern trends), I'd be happy to respond.

[bearly]

if you are referring to my post, i don't think you read it in the context of a "dying"thread. i would agree, in the main, w/ your post. i try to stress in my posts in various forums that "philosophy" is an activity, not a subject. critical thinking and conceptual analysis is the "stuff" we do................b

[aeest400]

I'm a newb in this forum, having lurked (and sometimes posted) in the poker forums for a few months, so I'm not familiar with your prior posts. I should have followed the train of responses more closely. I agree with your statement that philosophy is more of a process than a distinct subject. [I'll leave it at that, because this last sentence can be unpacked in many different ways--in fact, to the extent it is a subject, I would consider most science to be a branch of philosophy, which is hinted at by the prior classification of science as "natural philosophy.")

[tyrus72]

[ QUOTE ]
By the way, philosophy students tend to score the highest marks on the medical school (MCAT) and law school (LSAT) admission tests.

[/ QUOTE ]

Average LSAT Scores for 29 Majors with over 400 Students Taking the Exam



1994-95 rank
Major

Average score


Number of students


1991-92 rank


Average score


Number of students


1 Physics/ Math 157.6 689 1 157.2 634
2 Philosophy/ Religion 156.0 1,884 2 155.9 1,547

[deleteduser]

Beyond good and evil

Friedrich nietzsche a very intersting book with an interesting history

[guesswest]

In response to philosophy papers having become a 4 hour cut and paste job. Yeah, maybe a bit, but I'd say you can get away with that way less with philosophy vs almost any other subject you'd be writing papers for. You're generally graded on coherence and consistency, if you don't understand what you're pasting together completely you won't have that since philosophy generally involves fairly dense and abstract logic (as oppose to say literature, where you can to some extent skim). And if you do understand what you're pasting in that way, you could write the paper yourself in a similar time frame, so you wouldn't be doing it in the first place. I think philosophy professors can identify material sourced this way blindfolded.

And I don't think this is a stupid thread at all, it's a great thread. As a philosophy grad I'm extremely interested in what's showing up on undergrad programs currently.

[atrifix]

The philosophy textbook that was used in my 101 class some years ago was Reason and Responsibility by Feinberg and Shafer-Landau. Not a very deep book, but I think that I'd use it if I were going to teach 101.

[guesswest]

Just looking at my previous post, and thinking I maybe made my point poorly. Just in case I've caused offense to any literature/humanities students out there - I don't think these subjects are easy degrees at all. I don't think any degree is easy.

But what distinguishes philosophy in my mind from all the other humanities subjects it's normally grouped with in public perception - is that the mastery isn't progressive in the same way.

If you skim read a novel/poem on a plane, you understand a little bit of something about it. If you read it more carefully you get more, if you read it again you get more, if you dissect and analyze it you get more. If you're a successful undergraduate humanities student, you're pretty deep in that process and working as hard, and demonstrating as much ability, as any college student.

But philosophy doesn't work in the same way. Very commonly in philosophy texts understanding works by way of a 'eureka' moment - there is generally one underlying sequence of logic, one idea or principle, that you either 'get' or don't get. The work is reaching the point where you 'get' that idea - once you do, it's very easy to write a paper. If you don't, you can't string together a paper without the work because it'll be very apparent to a teacher who does understand the subject, that you yourself don't. Because your work will be lacking in the kind of continuity it would have if you had a genuine understanding. I suppose philosophy is in that sense much closer to math than it is to the humanities.

[bearly]

hi, we must be talking at cross-purposes. it could be the fact, as well, that i completed my undergraduate studies in 1966 and my graduate work in 1972. you may be basing your remarks on what goes on in the under-graduate courses in philosophy at a very good university. i'm a bit confused at any rate. we can talk about dynamic theories concerning how we come to "know" things. the dialoge starting w/, say, hume and moving thru wittgenstein, russell etc., covering frege, perry, james and others along the way, was a very 'live' debate in the 60's when i started grad school. now, how many 'aha' responses i saw as a ta and ra, dealing w/ undergraduate students is another question. frankly, i didn't see much of it. that is why i would tell the students who were eager/confused to go back and read marx, spend a little time w/ asian thought, and try to get a feel for how they really do acquire knowledge. i believed, and still do, that they learned a great deal by examining how they see their own intellectual growth, and perhaps somewhere along the line the idea of the 'emergent' nature of knowledge 'emerges'. i shall try to get back on the path: i just don't see those eager-but-confused young folks today. i don't see the lower division students reading 'real' books. so much is given over to text-books. i don't think that is the best way to learn how to 'do' philosophy. students should struggle right along w/ an individual mind which is itself engaged in, as james' would say "thrashing the truth" out of a subject. (admittedly a favorite quote of mine). the preceeding is what brought me to the subject of the internet. text-books just seem too much like google searches, and i won't re-itterate the rest. any way, those are my ramblings...............b

[guesswest]

I probably overstated my case a bit, but I certainly think there's some of that happening with most branches of philosophy, certainly within epistemology. Although I'm not sure where in that russian doll this conversation is taking place.

I'm not proposing that learning in philosophy doesn't build on itself and isn't layered. It's definitely progressive in that sense, and having spent quite a few years at it I still feel like I've barely made a dent. But on the most part there are central concepts underlying different branches of philosophy that represent a framework, and if you don't 'get' these you can't 'do' them. The doing in my mind is the easy part. There can be no doubt there is creativity involved in the process of philosophy, but where it exists it tends to take the form of lateral thinking as oppose to art.

The arts are an evolving body too, but you don't need to read Shakespeare to understand a contemporary novel. It's much harder to join in the middle of the conversation with philosophy. I know that's more or less exactly what you said also, but I see these as a series of isolatable eureka moments as oppose to a fuzzier and gradual bulking up. You need to be able to do basic multiplication to do advanced mathematics, but when you first understood multiplication as a child there is a suddenness to it, and it's self-contained. And once you understood it, doing it was easy. Philosophy is self contained packets like this to me, which distinguishes it from the humanities which are multi-layered in much more non-specific and ambiguous ways. I remember when I was 16 and suddenly 'got' what a Platonic form is, that's a definite 'aha' moment. Kant on space and time, another 'aha'.

I have a feeling this post was non-linear, internally contradictory and generally made no sense /images/graemlins/grin.gif But dead on my feet and need to crash, so will leave it as is.