Our sessions will hopefully mirror both the flexibility of a genuine and substantial exchange of ideas and the rigorous articulation of a philosophical argument. This course will combine lecture, questions and answers, and – especially – discussion, so please share your insights and doubts about the theories put forth in our textbook with your colleagues and with me. Philosophy is not only to be counted among the liberal arts; one can safely say that it also pervades the other liberal arts, including, to a great extent, the sciences. Yet, it’s equally important to be mindful of some of the differences between certain domains that pertain to the liberal arts, such as the humanities and the sciences. If you haven’t taken many courses in the humanities so far, it may be worth keeping in mind that a philosophy course is not exactly the setting for hunting down definitive and indubitable facts. Rather, it is quite conceivable that one and the same problem (e.g.: How can we reconcile the hefty dose of evil afflicting this world with the notion of a benevolent God?) admits of quite a few, perhaps equally plausible, solutions. Don’t forget: this is a philosophy class and there is no truly philosophical theory that cannot or should not be subjected to reasoned discussion and careful reevaluation. We can imagine a sign outside our classroom reading: “Worship of idols, be they Plato or Descartes, prohibited here M, W, F: 9-9:50.”
Logic – PL 210 Stuart Glennan
Logic is perhaps the most foundational of the liberal arts. The curriculum of the medieval university recognized seven liberal arts, which were thought to be required of all free persons. The three foundational disciplines, known as the trivium, were grammar, rhetoric and logic. Our course focuses on logic, but it touches on the other two parts of the trivium as well. While the form of logic we study in this class developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we share with medieval scholars the conviction that if you don’t understand the principles of logical argument, there is very little you can truthfully be said to know at all.
Philosophy of Art – PL 340 Tiberiu Popa
One of the benefits that you can derive from this course (and, by the way, from many other liberal arts courses as well) is an increasingly insightful reflection on how the subject matters that you study at this university relate to your life – that is, besides hopefully securing a passing grade and fulfilling some requirements. Philosophy is too often misconceived as being divorced from life, whereas it actually pervades almost every aspect of our lives through and through, from, say, political debates to how we perceive the beauty and ugliness (sorry to break the news…) of the world we happen to live in. The word ‘aesthetics’ itself is intimately related to the notion of perception(aisthesis in Greek), and the way in which we perceive the world defines partly who we are. Our discussion will cover a considerable number of types of objects of aesthetic appreciation as well as a correspondingly large and variegated range of modes of perception. Given the complexity and the variety of the kinds of philosophical discourse displayed by our anthology, the texts that we’ll tackle in this course are also meant to better prepare you to analyze various arguments and to react to them in an articulate and plausible manner. This enterprise does not entail the promise that I will tell you what beauty is (or even the assumption that I know what it is); indeed, I do hope that you’ll all help me to get closer to being able to explain what beauty is.