(Honors-Social Sciences-Instructor: Gwen Duralek)
Overview:
In this course you are invited to participate in an activity that is about 2 500 years old and you are expected to develop your own ideas about the philosophical problems, theories and arguments. You will be challenged to think critically on your own, but always taking into consideration what the others had and have to say about those matters.
Philosophy enhances the improvement of the analysis of personal convictions, the understanding of the diversity of arguments of others and the awareness of the limited character of our knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is a basic and important part of education and an instrument for making democratic life deeper.
As a participant in this philosophy course you will be challenged to think critically and learn to think with the ideas and points of view of past and contemporary philosophers. You can expect to write, read and debate extensively, always by means of an argumentative discourse and weekly assignments.
Important Philosophers/Philosophies:
-Socrates - Socratic Method
-Plato-Aristotle
-Immanuel Kant - Kantian Theory
-Rene Descartes - Cartesian Rationalism
- Friederich Nietzche - Beyond Good and Evil
- John Locke - Consent of the Governed
- Hannah Ardent - Banality of Evil
- David Hume - Rationalism
- John Berkeley - Empiricism
- Metaphysics
-Epistemology
-Philosophy of Religion
- Political Philosophy
Favorite Assignment:
During this course most assignments were based around discussion , which is exactly how this kind of course should operate. Out of all of these assignments I enjoyed a topic the most rather than a specific assignment. I particualrly was engaged in the discussions on Morality as it truly displays the views of an individual and how exactly they were influenced and is also a funa subject to play around with because its definition can differ from person to person. Something that can be taken from this lesson is that Morality in itself is a bias and that there truly no "ultimate good" or "ultimate evil" because what is immoral or immoral changes between individual, group, nation, and region.
Post-Course:
After the completion of the course I found myself satisfied with the content covered as well as what I took away from it. I find that the most important subjects touched upon were the simple idea of being able to think, how to think, and how to develop personal views. We jumped from topic to topic covering subject matter such as Morality, Beauty, Power, Wisdom, and Knowledge. All of these things are difficult ot explain in just a few words, but I feel that these subjects, while not of dire importance, can be very intersting to tackle if they are expored properly as most individuals just take them at face-value or what they're raised to believe. Overall it was a satisfying course that was very engaging, had a very reasonable workload each week and was far more "relaxed" than most courses. However, this does not mean that i was truly allowed to slack because the discussions required one to be fairly and activley engaged in the subject. What makes this course desirable for the most part is the subject-content and the air of "there is no wrong answer".
