SYLLABUS FOR PHILOSOPHY 425, Fall 2008 |
INSTRUCTOR: James A. Keller OFFICE: Daniel 217 PHONE: 4594.
OFFICE HOURS: MWF 11:00-11:30 ; T 11:00-12:00 (except during faculty meetings and convocations); and by appointment.
CONTACTING ME: Call my office. If I am not there, leave a voice-mail message. Or you may contact me by e-mail at kellerja@wofford.edu. I check both regularly, so they give you two ways to contact me. If you need to reach me quickly and neither of these work, you may call me at home; my home phone number is 579-7313.
TEXTS: Robert Frank, Passions within Reason. Norton.
R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking. Oxford.
Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality. Chicago.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course focuses on the question "To what extent can and should reason guide our commitments, especially our moral commitments?" We will closely analyze some books relevant to answering this question. Students will be expected to write short weekly papers that will be distributed to all other students in the course. Because the papers will be either summaries or evaluations of the works, students will be required to develop their skills of analysis and evaluation. In class we will use the papers as a basis for our discussion of the books. Thus, students will be required to interact with the instructor and each other in the analysis and evaluation of the books.
BASIS OF GRADING:
2/3 of final grade: average of papers and final exam
1/3 of final grade: overall grade on term paper
In addition, class participation may influence the final grade.
WEEKLY PAPERS: The class will be divided into two groups. After the first week, for each day in which we have a new reading assignment, members of each group will be responsible for submitting either a summary of the assigned reading or a critique of it. The groups will alternate responsibilities in each new assignment.
Summaries: Each summary (about 3-4 pages) should
(1) state the thesis or purpose of the material read. (That is, if the reading is an argument, it should state the thesis; if it is an analysis, it should state what the reading is attempting to analyze.)
(2) summarize the main points and indicate how they relate to the thesis or purpose of the reading.
A major part of the purpose of requiring you to write a summary is to require you to decide what is important and what is not, and to require you to wrestle with the issue of how the various parts of the reading relate to each other and to the author's overall purpose. Thus, your grade on the summary will depend not only on the accuracy of what you say the author said but on your judgment about what should be included in the summary and what omitted. All of the readings include more than one chapter. Be sure you state the purpose of each chapter in your summary and how that chapter relates to the overall purpose of the work. (Hint: in a well-written philosophy book the author usually states the purpose of each chapter somewhere in the first page or two of the chapter. Look for it.)
Critiques: Each critique should raise significant questions regarding the interpretation (What is the author saying?) and/or adequacy (Is what the author says true and/or adequately supported?) of what the author says. You should not feel required to say only bad things about the work; additional considerations that support the author's position are also appropriate in a critique. But you should try to include new material (from your own knowledge or from other things you have read) that supports or raises problems for the author's position. That is, in a critique, you should be trying to (1) raise significant questions about the interpretation, meaning, and/or implications of what the author says, or (2) provide the reader with reasons to accept or to reject what the author says, reasons in addition to those given by the author, or (3) both (1) and (2).
In your papers you may, if you wish, use a few judiciously chosen quotations, but you should avoid frequent or long quotations. When you quote or paraphrase, you should indicate the page or pages to which you are referring. This can be done simply by putting the page number(s) in parentheses after the quotation or paraphrase e.g., Hare says that ethical judgments are "universalizable prescriptions" (p. 11). If you want to refer to some book other than the one assigned for that day, put in parentheses the name of the author and the page(s)‑‑e.g., (Brandt, p. 15)then give a full bibliography at the end of your paper.
On papers of either type, your grade will depend on the mechanics of your writing (spelling, punctuation, organization, etc.) as well as on content.
ALL PAPERS MUST BE PREPARED ON A WORD PROCESSOR OR TYPEWRITTEN!
ALL PAPERS OF EITHER TYPE ARE DUE BY. THEY WILL ALL BE POSTED IN THE ASSIGNMENTS FOLDER OF THIS COURSE FOR ALL OTHER MEMBERS OF THE CLASS TO READ. YOU SHOULD PRINT OUT A COPY OF EACH PAPER FOR YOURSELF TO READ BEFORE YOU COME TO CLASS ON MONDAY. YOU SHOULD ALSO BRING TO CLASS A COPY OF THE PAPER YOU WROTE.
CLASS DISCUSSION: When you read the papers written by other students, read them critically -i.e., evaluate them as you read them. Ask yourself questions such as these:
1. Is the summary clear and accurate? Does it focus on the important points, and does it omit anything more important than the points it includes?
2. Are the points made in the critiques based on a correct understanding of the material and are the evaluations offered justified?
If a negative point is made in a critique, how might the author respond to that criticism?
These are the sorts of issues we will discuss in class. I may ask one or more of you to read or summarize your paper. If the content of the papers is generally good (i.e., if it reflects an understanding of the assignments), we will not have any tests on the readings.
Since this may well be a new sort of assignment for you, I will weigh the first papers more lightly while you gain a clearer idea of what is expected in these papers. Moreover, I will drop the two lowest paper grades; you may take advantage of this fact if you have one or two days on which a paper is due and on which you have too many other responsibilities to do an adequate job on the paper. But I will not accept late papers unless you are ill or are in some other way prevented from posting the paper on time by circumstances genuinely beyond your control.
The paper assigned as the final exam will count as two papers in averaging your work on class papers. The final exam is not eligible to be dropped as one or both of your lowest grades.
TERM PAPER: For a term paper, each student will do a critical review of a book or some other project mutually agreed upon. Instructions for this paper will be given separately.
THE MECHANICS OF WRITING: This course involves considerable writing, and I will correct closely all your written material. Please use this correction as an opportunity to polish the mechanics of your writing. Look over the corrections I make. If you do not understand any of them or do not agree that some correction is appropriate, please come and talk with me about it. If you do not talk with me about corrections, I will assume that you agree that the corrections are appropriate and that you understand them. Therefore, I will expect you to make mistakes of this sort much less frequently (ideally never) in the future. I will make notes on the sorts of errors in mechanics that you make, and I will grade with increasing severity repeated mistakes of the same sort. (Note that part of the mechanics of good writing is correct spelling. If you use a word processor, take the additional few minutes to run a spell checker on your paper; if you do not use a word processor, you should.)
CHEATING AND PLAGIARISM: I regard cheating and plagiarism both as serious breaches of trust between you and me and as practices which undermine the educational process. Therefore, any instances of suspected cheating or plagiarism will be turned over to the Judicial System.
TURNITIN.COM: All your weekly papers and the final version of your term paper must also be submitted to TURNITIN.COM. Instructions for doing this will be given in class.