2009 Fall Proseminar Professor Blog

Return to Philosophy Proseminar

I'll send these out as emails too, but here's my blog for the course:

1st Meeting: September 1st, 2009

It was great to finally meet you all the other day. Naturally, we had to spend a lot of time on introductory matters. We'll get down to the philosophy from here on out. Here are a couple of follow up items from class:

1. Packets are ready at 10am. Pick up yours at Rebman 203, during business hours today and Friday.

2. Browsing Exercise: I would like you to use some of the reference sources we mentioned(Routledge Encyclopedia (through Foley), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia) to spend time browsing. Give it about 2 hours if you can. You might start with two or three terms or concept from Tuesday night that you have heard of but don't know much about. Then explore links from reference sources. Keep track of what your browse and a few details that stood out from your reading. Feel free to look at lots of things briefly or a few things in more depth. Then write up a two page log of where you've been and what stood out for you.

3. "Interests and Preferences" emails due Friday. At Tuesday's class, we mentioned A LOT of things that you all might be interested in knowing or exploring about philosophy. Send me an email (put "Pro-seminar: my interests" in the subject line) in which you identify particular topics or issues in philosophy that you would like to work on during the seminar. Your emails will help me fill in the course schedule. They will also help you identify individual projects that you might work on and bring back to the seminar in some form, such as a presentation.

4. 1st Reconstruction due Tuesday night. The course schedule shows that your readings include pieces from Dennett and Nagel. Choose one of the readings and then summarize the main arguments, starting with the broadest claim that you think the author is supporting. We'll use the term "reconstruction" to refer to a logical summary of the rationales (arguments and explanations) in a piece or reflective speech or writing. Complete your reconstruction in no more than 1 and 1/2 pages.

That's about it. Have a great Labor Day weekend. Please come to class with ideas and comments on the readings!

Alfino

2nd Meeting: September 8th, 2009

Class:

Good meeting last night. Thanks. I think we made a good start on both our practice of discussion and writing. We're not trying to adopt a single model for discussion, but I do want you to consider the value of really getting a good sympathetic reading of the text in place prior to critical evaluation. One of the strengths of your discussion last night was that you really seemed to be listening to each other, and the group did a pretty good job of "self-correcting" -- a couple of times someone suggested a different focus or emphasis in the reading and it seemed like lots of people were following and weighing in non-verbally. Sometimes it takes longer to get that going. We need to work on isolating specific arguments more quickly (first criterion of good reconstruction!) and of course, we have a lot of cool philosophical methods and tricks of the trade to learn.

Many of you wrote good summaries and I'll try to have those commented for you by Thursday. Now that we've introduced a somewhat structured understanding of what a "reconstruction" is, let's try to practice that. Please write your reconstruction next week (1 page) on the Singer chapter, remembering that, as with the Dennett reading, you're only getting the first chapter of a book. There will be lots of rationales in it, but many of them will require more of the book to fill in. Just note in your reconstruction when you're getting the whole argument and when you're not.

I'm also working on the next few weeks of readings. You may need to pick up some xeroxing on Thursday of this week, but I'll let you know. My sense is that the group wouldn't mind a few more chapters of Dennett at some point, but I didn't sense lots of people who wanted to rush to buy the book or never look at it again. Tell me if I'm getting the vibe right.

Don't forget, office hours are M-Th 9-11. Drop by, especially if you have questions about your grading scheme. (I've added a new assignment that allows you to earn up to 10% of your informal grade by posting significant information to the course wiki. For example, next week it would be great for someone to do a page on Singer which explains his basic positions and notes some of the controversial positions he has taken. You can do some of this with cut and paste from other online sources or by adding links, but you could also write a little text with your take on things. The Assignment is called "wiki posts".)

Oh, apologies to a couple of you who started your grading scheme. Since I had to edit the assignments, I needed to reset the grading scheme records. Please go ahead and set up your grading schemes. I'm eager to see what you want to do.

Alfino

3rd Meeting: September 15th, 2009

Thanks for a good class. I hope you all feel that we are officially under way and even (nearly) up to cruising speed. We do have a tremendous variety of things to look at this semester, but I hope that's a strength of our approach.

Our discussion work was pretty good. I noticed more agreement about the conclusions that people found in the reading. I do think more of you could experiment with using the language of "rationales" and "reconstruction" in your discussion comments. Also, I noticed that we not asking each other alot of questions during discussion. That could just be the newness of the group, but alot of philosophical moves happen while developing a line of questioning (think Socrates, but don't do it that way, exactly!). So there's a couple of things to keep in mind for next week.

The biggest (little) insight I can offer you from last night is (to repeat) that you need "entertain" views more. This isn't target practice. Let the view's potential insights emerge from an initially sympathetic treatment. When you offer critiques, try to detrmine whether the theory has resources for responding or try to modify the theory (even if its not your own theory) to see how it might respond to criticisms. This is really important.

Looking ahead to next week. Please write two pages giving both a reconstruction and critique of Dennett's idea that evolution is a universal algorithm that may explain more than just variation among species. Try to give a page to each task. Of course, only the main lines of your reasoning will fit in this pages limit, but please know that you are welcome to develop your ideas further in a longer paper. Also, we'll need to collect some information on reductionism. I've set up a page for that and I'll certainly contribute to it, but please start by browsing reference resources on this topic. It's will play a significant role in our discussion.

oops. Just noticed the print job on Dennett was botched. I'll go scan it. ... Ok, it's on the wiki under Readings.

Please stop by in the next two weeks or so if you'd like to discuss your grading scheme or anything else in the course.

Alfino

4th Meeting: September 22th, 2009

Class:

That was probably our best discussion to date. Thanks so much. I thought many of you took time to try to understand Dennett (which isn't easy) and then critically assess his views. We didn't rush the criticism, but people put forward some good criticisms while recognizing the theory's force. I'll read your reconstructions, but I gathered we had pretty good overlap in how we were seeing the rationales.

I hope you're all ready for a change of pace. We have an interesting diversity of readings for next week. We'll get back to talking about method and sample a few interesting pieces.

Let me know if you are planning to attend the NW Philosophy conference.

Please send in a brief email about how the course is going.

Nothing to write for the seminar for next week. Come prepared, please.

Thanks.

Alfino

5th Meeting: September 29th, 2009

Good class, gang.

Some really good discussion on postmodern philosophy. I thought all of the small groups gravitated toward similar kinds of questions about how postmodern philosophers look at meaning and truth. I've always found that a useful place to dig in as well. Think about the basis of your confidence in the "UPS model" of meaning. Does it really describe meaning formation? Or is the stability of meaning in that model (everything reliably coded, transmitted, and delivered) a relatively specific achievement in an otherwise chaotic and complex process of meaning formation which always defers meaning? See. I still remember how to talk like that. I think F, D, and R are generally right about the instability of meaning and "immanence" (that we don't get outside language), but I want to encourage you to develop your skepticism.

I hope the logic lesson on validity was helpful. I'll start compiling study questions for the Philosophical Methods test.

After the break, we had a large group discussion about Wiredu. I have to thank you guys for that. This discussion sharpened for me the tension between thinking about philosophy as universal and as culture. I take Wiredu's general point pretty seriously -- we shouldn't compare traditional spiritualism and animism with Western European/Anglo-American philosophy (really, philosophy). But it did seem after our discussion (especially with the scent of postmodernism still in the air) that it might be naive to think of philosophy as completely like math and science. Is there something it is like to be a German philosopher? But then I pull back. Is that something just the contingent history of philosophy in that culture, or does it run into ethnicity, even a tiny bit?

I'm still not sure how de Botton went over. We were tired. But I think we did see what a little postmodern playfulness can do to the story of Socrates, our putative martyr and hero of philosophy. It's kind of like Southpark got a hold of him.

Ok, that should do it. I'll try to get some of the registration fee from the department for those of you going to the NW conference. You might want to compare notes with each other on travel and places to stay.

Start printing or downloading the articles for next week. It's going to be a good one!

Alfino

6th Meeting: October 6th, 2009

Class,

I hope you feel that we opened up the faith and reason topic in some interesting ways. One thing that stood out from our discussion for me was how much one's position on the issue depends upon specific commitments about the nature of reason (can it be plural?) and the relationships among theology, philosophy, and science. Also, I think we recognized the importance to faith about belief in the truths of one's faith, but we did not settle the question of whether it is rational (or natural) for humans to use different ways of assessing radically different kinds of beliefs. Of course, the traditionalist/realist will point out that all belief is about the same reality, which is a fair point. But what if there's really good evidence that we're selected for cognitive capacities that makes religion possible and that we use those capacities to treat religious belief differently from beliefs about bodies? (Recall the "persons/bodies" argument.)

While we didn't talk about method last night, I did want to make one comment about method in our discussions. In addition to the formal methods we are discussing for our philosophical methods test, there are methods in philosophy that include creating puzzles or paradoxes for a position (Isn't it a puzzle that rational theology doesn't work as a method for adjudicating better and worse theologies the way scientific method and practice does?) or even using drama and emotion -- teasing, joking, even exaggerating! It's something we can do only over a basis of trust that we're helping each other develop our own philosophical views. I'll be pretty candid with you about my views and try to use humor when I can to make a point, but I really am your faithful philosophy coach, and I'm here to help you develop your position. At the end of the day, Socrates is right about the whole mid-wife metaphor. That's how it works, I think.

After the break, I thought people were noticeably more tired. My pitch was that CSR and related developments allow us to pose the question of faith and reason in a specific and recently productive way, "How can scientific reason study faith?" That turns out to be a really fruitful question, in my opinion. I don't think it reduces or disproves faith. In fact, it makes a case for the naturalness of religious experience. The fact that it doesn't address the objective truth of actual religious beliefs can be construed as a weakness of this approach, but I think it's actually quite a productive strategy. It allows researchers to pay attention to how we cognitively process religious claims and experience, and that evidence seems to be revealing interesting and stable structures, many of which are trans cultural. The case for evolutionary accounts of religion is different, but also has the effect of "naturalizing" at least the visible and measurable part of religious practice. Right down to "neurotheology" (yes, there is such a thing), the naturalist study of religion in the last twenty years helps explain how religion may work psychologically and how it may have emerged. Religion in general comes out looking pretty good -- something Marx, Freud, and the early Darwinists might not have predicted. Many intellectuals (whose religion switch is off) still believe that religion is just an error or accident of our history that we'll correct soon. Naturalist accounts leave that possibility open as well, since the structures it discloses might just be vestiges of capacities (like predator detection)selected for another purpose. But this might actually be a question that can actually be investigated naturalistically -- something I wouldn't have imagined twenty years ago.

If you're going to the Northwest Philosophy Conference, please get on their website and register. They need an accurate count for things. I'll work on getting the registration subsidy by the time we get there, which is when you would have to pay.

Take care and have a great week. Please in during stop office hours or make an appointment to talk about your work in the course. It really helps to discuss the things you've agreed to do. And it's fun!

Alfino 16:17, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

7th Meeting: October 13th, 2009

Well, I was bragging about you guys to my 201 class and it actually seemed to motivate them! Seriously, you guys made a pretty significant "turn" in my opinion from generating a few pretty good ideas about the material to using philosophical methods more actively to turn up lots and lots of rationales, points of view, and questions. This is an important development because I think it involves using methods more than just general intuitive responses. Also, at some point, we start asking what philosophers from different viewpoints would say, argue, or ask about the idea under discussion instead of just responding with your immediate point of view (which is still very valuable, of course!). You get so much more material to work with when you use method in this way and that usually improves the philosophical outcome of your work.

The other dimension of progress Tuesday night in my opinion was that you all reached a nice level of comfort in doing philosophy with each other. As we noted in class, the ability to have a good philosophical discussion with someone requires a kind of trust and at least partial openness to disclose your thinking and views. There is a kind of closeness to this relationship which philosophers have long described and which you have a great opportunity to experience in a Gonzaga philosophy program. We've got a wonderful variety of philosophers in the seminar, which can also be a challenge, but you guys seem to be figuring it out. Bravo!

Alfino 16:29, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

8th Meeting: October 13th, 2009

Just a brief note, folks. I hope you found Dr. Liu's introduction to philosophical problems in comparative philosophy informative and thought provoking. It was interesting to see how interpretive theories come into play in this work. You will pick up more resources for this when we talk about hermeneutics latter in the semester. Also, I found last night's class a good counterpoint to Wiredu. I guess I still agree with his basic point, but it may turn out that some parts of philosophy are more embedded in traditional culture than he allows.

Please make good use of the next week or two to organize your upcoming work in the course, and make an office visit. I'm starting to get more writing from you all, and I hope that keeps coming in. You're welcome to submit drafts on everything.

Well, see you next week for the Methods test and public talk.

Alfino 15:45, 21 October 2009 (UTC)