2010 Fall Proseminar Professor Blog

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On this page, you'll find my "after class" blogs for the course. I'll send them as email to the class.

1st Class, August 31, 2010

Great start gang. I hope you feel oriented to the course and have a sense of the possibilities for our work. It's great to be underway, and you all seem ready for some kind of philosophical adventure! Thanks for the helpful information about your interests, which I'll be working on.

I hope you found the fist discussion useful for thinking about assumptions we have about philosophy. Definition turns out to be a focus in some of our work on method, so don't stop thinking about how you define philosophy. Consider a "thin" definition, like "evaluation of arguments and points of views on basic questions of reality and existence" as well as "thicker" ones, like "the love of wisdom". Maybe the definition you gravitate toward tells you something about your focus. The article by Hadot for next week should also connect with this issue.

Please start your browsing, along with the reading for next week. It's not too early to rough in your grading scheme on the course website. And feel free to stop by during office hours or by appointment to talk about your interests.

2nd Class, September 7, 2010

Thanks for a good class last night. We're still settling in with each other and next week class should feel more like a seminar. If the class seemed a tiny bit random or digressive, don't worry, we'll start to focus more. Early on I want to motivate you to explore your interests and base some of your work on this exploration. You have discretion about the work your do in the course. Certainly, we all need to be committed to prepping for each week's seminar, (and I don't think we've reached our peak there yet), but beyond that, you should still have room in your time budget for the course to explore specific interests you might have and even write about them. As the seminar progresses, though, you'll notice that I'll be less digressive and we'll focus on positions, claims, arguments, explanations, and interpretations. Of course, we don't want to get rid of all the digressions!

My summary of class topics this morning goes like this: We used the Hadot reading to look at both a definition of philosophy (as therapeutic / related to living a good life) and an interpretation of a period of philosophy. Hadot's reading is intrinsically interesting, but it also challenges our intuitions about the nature of philosophy. I heard many of you agree that you expect philosophy to help you live life better (whether it's "learning to die" or not), but we also acknowledged that academic philosophy's contribution to that might be indirect. Knowing about the Hellenistic period helps us imagine how philosophy might accomplish its academic aims while providing real, knowledge-based, guidance about life. We'll also explore this by reading some non-academic philosophy.

In the next part of class, we started our work on philosophical method by introducing some terms and a theory of rationales. Some of this will feel like review, but soon we'll attack those lists of philosophical methods on the wiki. We'll start pointing out the methods as they are occurring in our readings, but please try to notice the methods as you do reading in your other philosophy classes as well.

The final chunk of the class involved the reading by Haidt about the brain. We detailed the discrepancies between our contemporary understanding of the brain and typical philosophical assumptions about consciousness. I hope we started to sketch the competing intuitions that philosophers have about this. In the extreme, that "psychology and neurology don't matter" to philosophical accounts of consciousness and that, at the other end, that they are at the center of knowledge and therefore central to a knowledge-based philosophy. We're going to see this dynamic in more readings in the coming weeks and then in historical context in November.

Ok, gang, that's what I recall. For next week, we're going to work toward more of a seminar style, so please recall the list of suggested ways for you to develop content and reflection for the class. Let's agree that those who are posting content for this week do so by Sunday night (again we're shooting for 1/3 to 1/2), but everybody should try to study the readings in sufficient depth that you have a good initial sketch of the central arguments and things you found interesting. I gather we couldn't have done that last night, but we're just getting started. Getting this to work will require some planning, so please put course prep time on your calendar!

Looking forward to our seminar next week.

Alfino

3rd Class, September 14, 2010

That was a really good class, thanks. The energy level is great, we had good discussion, and even ice cream (there's more in the freezer if you want to drop by Rebmann for some). As you could tell from the second installment of "method," I'd like you all to practice good reconstruction skills. Posting a reconstruction of the reading is a good thing to do, but hold off putting those up until Sunday night. That way we get more than one and you're encouraged to read the text before reading someone's summary of the rationales. If you practice the discipline of giving good reconstructions, it will help you become wise. So post a reconstruction of a part or whole of next week's reading to the wiki.

Speaking of wiki posts, I think we could increase the number and diversity of posts from this week. In addition to posting a critical comment or reconstruction, you can find out more about the authors and let us know something about them. Next week that's Dennett and Nagel. Dennett is a big controversial philosopher so I'd like someone to represent some of his views and controversies. How about a link to a video segment of the dude? He's all over. Then don't forget we're talking about theory of consciousness (philosophy of mind). Someone should go do some browsing on this. What are the main positions? Where does Dennett's fit into the landscape of thought on the nature of mind? All that is great stuff for posts. Remember that without a final, it's your preparation of each class that becomes a focus. That's all to the good, since we can achieve even greater heights of philosophical progress and pleasure if we really take the seminar aspect of the class seriously, as I sense you guys are doing.

Don't forget to post your examples of method from other readings. I assume you all have the two documents on method taped above your workspace, right?

Thanks to Samantha for bringing dessert next week.

Alfino