Spring 2010 Senior Seminar Professor's Blog

Back to Senior Seminar

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