Spring 2010 Senior Seminar Professor's Blog

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1/12

Meeting #1: Introductions

Great to meet you all last night. I enjoyed our discussion, and it made me optimistic about our seminar. You all enjoy a pretty good dynamic already, perhaps because of some common classes, but certainly also because of your sterling characters.

A couple of coaching notes on our discussion: As I mentioned last night, asking each other questions is good. The trick, of course, for one sort of questioning is to be Socratic without sounding like a prosecutor. But as you know there are lots of ways to use questions in philosophy besides Socrates' way. Just helping someone draw out their view by offering interpretive possibilities is useful. Also, while I was impressed with the pace of the discussion, I noticed that gap between speakers was about 1 second. At some point that needs to lengthen our you can guarantee that out of 10 people 2-4 just won't get a word in. Reflective pauses can be profound! One area of continual efforts at improvement in my philosophical work is my mindfulness of the dynamic of a discussion. My personal preference is that we take some time in the early part of the discussion to get some views out and have a critical look at them before developing and working out positions on them (and each other). But I also agree that sometimes the thing to do is jump right into the broader philosophical positions and differences.

I really like the fact that we were able to locate issues and arguments quickly in the prompt. You found good criticisms of the prompt, good angles to take, and even connected it with some historical philosophical issues. When I moved us to related topics, the transition was good. It's great that you're willing to contrast views with each other and enter into disagreement genially. Philosophy thrives on that.

The big challenge for next week will be how we all figure out what to prepare in addition to the reading, (Flanagan, Chapter 1). I hope I said some useful things about that. Remember, it can be background information, notes for an argument you want to make, questions, or even (especially) notes which reconstruct chunks of the reading you tracked closely. (I don't think I emphasized this last one in class.) I've created a space for this on the Course Notes. You might play around with the wiki and see if you want to create your own page and then put briefer notes or just a link to each week's work. That way you have a kind of portfolio representing your notes and contributions by seminar date.

I'll have a scan of Chapter 1 up later today.

Thanks again for a good start.

Alfino

1/19

Meeting #2: 1st session on Flanagan book

Thanks for a good class last night. I thought most of you made a good connection with the text. I didn't appreciate, prior to the seminar, how the idea of "spheres of meaning" might be in tension with his apparent reservation of the term knowledge for science. Also, I thought we managed some treatment of the main starting positions he's working from and his project. You guys have a healthy scepticism, but also seem to be seeing the overall argument that the book will make.

I thought our method for inviting your contributions shows promise. Let's try for at least 50% contributing content from either suggested topics or your own interests prior to class. Try to vary your contribution from week to week in terms of informative vs. critical work. And let's still try to get 100% contribution. I'm looking forward to seeing "2nd thoughts" from some of you. That could be a critical response to some topic, or you could follow up one of the topics that came up in class. For example, we could use a few words on compatibilism.

On group method, we've got some strengths. You guys seem interested in each other's views, follow each other's comments and keep the discussion connected very well. I'm afraid I'm guilty of contributing to one of our faults: we still have an average pause time between comments of less than one second! We need to try to collectively manage the "flow" and rhythm of the discussion. It might be a goal for next week for us to collectively recognize when its time to leave a reflective moment. Early in the discussion we should be laying out a range of topics. We tried to do that a couple of times, but we kept drilling down into whatever came up. Maybe this is just your natural enthusiasm. That's not a horrible problem (the opposite tendency is worse), but a better dynamic would involve more awareness of the pulse of the group and where others are with the topic and a bit more self-regulation. Putting your own questions out in the discussion would be good too. "Did anyone think...?" often invites a collaboratively developed argument. Not an easy play to run, but it often produces novel results. Don't be reluctant to ask people to explain their positions further. It seems like you're putting someone on the spot, but it's basic philosophical mid-wifery to draw each other out.

We're building on a good base of talent and preparation. When we hit our philosophical high note, it's going to be something.

Alfino

1/26

Class,

That was a really good seminar session, thanks. The group dynamics were good at the start, and they keep getting better. Lots more reflective time and lots of help with each other's views. Also, it's great to see your viewpoints and perspectives develop and assert themselves. That's just what should happen, and it's both revealing issues in the Flanagan text and helping me see some of your philosophical projects.

On the Flanagan text specifically, the issue of privileging of science as knowledge is important. Of the various ways of privileging it, Flanagan's is relatively moderate. The "spheres of meaning" give you something to hang on to is you happen to believe things about art or God, say, that can't be shown to be valid knowledge. The question I was getting at with the complicated question about how you would regard someone who didn't see the truth of your revealed religion could be put in these terms: If knowledge and rationality are closely related, then some cases of "not getting" an item of knowledge will be cases of "not seeing it" (just not being smart enough) while other cases of "not getting" an item of knowledge might occur because the item of knowledge has limited scope (it's meaning is personal or communal), it's arational (from training or part of non-rational brain functioning), or it's not knowledge. The question would be, how do you categorize cases of others "not getting" your religion, not coming to believe it is true even after you put whatever considerations (proofs, testimonials, etc.) you can in front of the person. My point is that even if we can allow for religion to count as profound personal and communal knowledge, but there's a huge difference between that and science. Therefore, we need something like a knowledge/Knowledge distinction, which is roughly the spheres of meaning/knowledge distinction in OF.

Lots of other topics from last night could be taken up again now or in the coming weeks. I sensed some interest in evolutionary ethics, for example. Please keep track of things you found interesting and important to you philosophically that we don't get enough time for. Those could be good topics for part two of the seminar. You could even put them on the wiki page for that.

On a practical matter, I will put up a bunch more options on the grading scheme. It was great that we had that discussion, because it helped me see the kinds of things you might like to choose.

Alfino