Project Selector Interface - Dir. William Angelette MA, MS.

You weren't born yesterday. You come to this course with all the wisdom and knowledge that your life has provided you. T his information is valuable and represents a significant portion of your contribution to the course. Lets find out where you stand and get a baseline of your appreciation of philosophy.

We begin the course considering Meta-philosophy; thinking through a suitable definition for Philosophy and examining our meta-cognitions of that process. We have a cursory glimpse at some early philosopher' attempts to consider the nature of reality through reason and experience apart from religion, myth, art or power. We label this branch of philosophy Meta-physics and it includes, among other studies, ontology-of what is, cosmology-of space time and objects, and mereology-of part to whole relations.

ANCIENT

One important measure of your progress in Philosophy is determined by the ability to examine and critique important philosophical arguments. You are required to master an outline form that provides a schemata for clearly presenting your ideas. Examine the following "Toy Journal Article" It's deliberately very bad. Check out the "Toy exegesis and critique." Look for something else wrong with the journal article and create your own analysis.

Your going to need some basic tools of logic

Now we'll apply all this to a reading assignment:

We're shifting the focus.

Initially our exploration of ancient Philosophy focused on Meta-physics. Meta-physics is often contrasted with Epistemology. While Meta-physics is concerned with the furniture of the world, Epistemology deals with the nature and scope of knowledge.

We'll focus on a portion of this dialogue that considers and then rejects an identification of knowledge with perception.

Below is an example of line by line exegesis for that section.

Our concern shifts from what constitutes knowledge to methods for acquiring certainty. We examine some threats to certainty particularly illusion and ambiguity. Our next major readings are the Methods and Meditations of Descartes. Read and prepare with your team to present. (alt. Meditations site with sec.4) To help prepare for your presentations review a model for close reading and critical review of philosophical literature together with assessment expectations. Abstracts on the Descartes readings will soon be due.

Descartes method ultimately leads us to the mind body problem.

Plato and Descartes readings can be found by clicking the links above or the appropriate link in the list below. If you're reading the Palmer text, the ancient philosophers including the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle are covered in the first 92 pages and we take up the Palmer text again with Descartes at page 160 - 180

Two mutually constraining methods Rationalism and Empiricism

Rationalism - Descartes' method of doubt together with his subsequent arguments are exemplary of a style of thinking that has come to be knows as Rationalism. Some other prominant philosphers of the period who embraced Rationalism include Spinoza and Leibniz. Rationalists' arguments, preceding largely on the basis of deductive reasoning from first principles, are to be contrasted with

Empiricists' arguments which tend to proceed inductively on the basis of sensory experience. Some empiricist philosophers of the period include Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Things begin to get more complex now as we develop our mental maps with diverse categories.

We'll have a sidelong glimp at a few other figures along the way and then have a look at kant. But don't stress. I won't be expecting anyone to actually read the whole thing. It's a long and difficult read. So, we certainly won't have time to do him justice.

Post mid-term review