1. Participation: In a philosophy class it’s crucial that you are involved in each day’s conversation. Not only will you get a lot more out of the class if you’re engaged with what’s going on, but one of our goals is to learn better how to think out loud, how to ask a question, how to raise an objection, and so on. And you can’t do that if you’re too quiet! Thus, as an incentive, 15% of your grade relies on your “participation” in the course. This includes class attendance, of course, but more importantly it includes the investment you make during our time together each time we meet, which involves doing the assigned reading, active listening, taking notes, and asking and answering questions. I’m also broadening the notion of participation a bit to encompass whatever time you might spend talking to each other outside of class, on our ethics blog, or on the Synapse forums. The latter are especially valuable for those of us who have a lot to say after we’ve had a while to mull things over. At midterm and at the end of the class, I’ll ask you to suggest a participation grade for yourself and provide a rationale for the grade you’ve given yourself. If it strikes me as fair, good enough. If I think you’ve been too generous to yourself or too hard on yourself (and that does happen, too!), we’ll have to negotiate a bit.
2. Reading Journal: I think you’ll quickly find that you will get much more out of the readings in this class if you truly engage with them. We often use interesting metaphors to characterize this engagement: we explore a text, we dig into it, we wrestle or grapple with it, and so on. This all suggests that reading can be a very active process—and a good deal of work, too. So can deciding what in the world you should think about what you’ve just read! To help you become more practiced in active and critical reading, I’m asking you to keep a reading journal throughout this course. And I’m going to ask you to journal in a quite specific way, which I’ll now go on to describe in a fair amount of detail.
The Double-Entry Journal: Begin by dividing each journal page into a left-hand side and a right-hand side. Your journal may be either typed or handwritten—if it’s legible, that is. I suggest you journal in the way you most naturally compose your thoughts, whether it’s with pen and paper or with keyboard and mouse (and if you’re journaling on your computer, probably the easiest way to do it is to use a simple two-column table).
The Left-hand side: On this side, your task is simple: to explain what you’re reading in your own words—except that in philosophy explaining things often turns out not to be all that simple a task. Perhaps the best way to begin to tell you what this side should look like is to tell you what it should not look like:
-- You should not just copy down a series of quotations from the text.
-- You should not very closely paraphrase the text in a quasi-mechanical way, changing a word here and a word there to produce something that looks like a different translation of the text, so to speak.
-- You should not merely summarize the text in the most general way possible, as if you were surveying it from a very great height, merely listing off points made by the author. (First, he talks about p, then he talks about q, then he talks about r…)
I find students commonly succumb to the temptation to try to journal without doing any real thinking, not because they are lazy, but because they are confused and a bit afraid of the text. Thus, the strategies bulleted above seem very safe. But avoid them at all costs! Instead, after reading a passage and mulling it over for a while, you should try to explain in your own way what you think is going on, even if this involves some risk on your part. Ask yourself: What is the author’s aim in this passage? How does this passage fit into the larger structure of its home chapter or book? Is the author making an argument? For what conclusion? And how does it go? Realize that to explain a text is to try to make it clearer, to illuminate it, if you will, by shedding light on what might be murky or hidden. This might require you to spend some time reflecting about the possible meanings of some key concept, or to excavate some hidden assumption(s), or any number of things. It might also help here to think of yourself as having the job of teaching someone what’s in the reading. As I hope you can see, explaining a text is a difficult business and it takes practice to become good at it. Let me close the description of the left side with just one more “do not…”
-- You should not attack or critique the author. Your job on this side is to put yourself in the author’s shoes and to be his or her advocate. Work as hard as you can to make good sense of the text. Set aside whatever suspicions or reservations you might have about it—until you move over to the other side of the page, anyway. If you do this, you’ll avoid the tendency to rush to judgment and thus any criticism you go on to develop is more likely to be relevant and fair.
The Right-hand side: On this side, your task is one of reflection and criticism. You’ve explained the text on the left side. Now what do you make of it? Does it say something true or false? Why? Does it say something important? Why? Does it contain a good argument or a bad one? If the argument’s bad, exactly what’s wrong with it? Is this text connected with something else you’ve been thinking or reading about, e.g. vocation? How? Can you think of some questions you wish the author would have addressed but didn’t? How might he or she have answered them? Can you develop one or more problems for what the author is doing? How might he or she respond to them? And so on. You have quite a bit of latitude here. Mainly, I want to see you do some interesting thinking that’s based on the text. A few more points to keep in mind:
-- Do keep your ruminations connected to the text. Yes, I want to know what you think, but I want to know what you think about the text. An occasional tangent is okay, but don’t get too far away from where you started!
-- Try to keep the ranting and complaining to a minimum and focus instead on analysis and reasoned criticism. It’ll help you do this if after you make a claim about the text, you ask yourself if you’ve explained why you made it.
-- I do encourage you to be critical of what you read, but you must be a careful, fair, and charitable reader. Don’t succumb to the straw man fallacy, which is to construct an inaccurate and unconvincing version of your opponent and then to knock him down with ease. Our goal is not to be successful in defending or attacking any particular view; it’s to think more clearly and more deeply about what’s before us.
-- Remember that the author you’re reading is incredibly smart. If you’re reading a primary text from hundreds of years ago, remind yourself that it is still being read today for a reason. If you’re reading a contemporary essay, you ought to know that it went through a fairly rigorous process to get published—and then it was (in most of our essays) chosen to be anthologized. All this means that you should regard what you’re reading as having quite a bit of credibility. If you’re thinking that what one of our authors says is really dumb, it is possible that you’re right and that you’ve located some obvious mistake, but it’s more probable that the mistake is yours—that you’ve misunderstood what’s going on in some way.
More nuts and bolts:
-- It would be very beneficial if you were to journal on everything you read in this way. But time is short. Thus, I will only require you to produce the equivalent of 2 single-spaced pages of double-column text each week (Times New Roman 12 point font). This means that if you feel like double-spacing or you’re handwriting, you’ll need to write more. I don’t want to have to nitpick about word counts, but it might help to know that each page of journal in the specified format has about 600 words.
-- I’ll collect journals every other Friday, beginning with September 1. Please turn in only the pages you’ve written during the previous two-week period, i.e. you’ll be handing in 4 pages each time. However, please don’t get in the habit of writing all your journal pages the night before I collect them! This’ll work much better if you sit down and write at several times each week.
3. Reflections: At three points in the semester I’ll ask you to write a fairly brief (2-3 pages) essay that we’ll call “reflections.” These are not meant to be formal philosophy papers, which means not that they can be less thoughtful or less well-crafted but rather that their tone can be informal and they can be quite a bit more speculative, autobiographical, and (obviously!) reflective than our more formal philosophy papers will be. Our reflections will all arise from our efforts to figure out how to think about ethics as Christians; no doubt we’ll also grapple with the idea of vocation in one or more of these as well.
4. Papers: Three medium-length papers (@ 5 pages each) will make up a full half of your grade in this class, so you’ll want to invest lots of time and effort in them. Each of these papers will focus on one of our main texts; thus, the first will be on Plato, the second on Mill, and the third on Kant. Paper guidelines will be provided at the appropriate time, but you’ll have more than a week to write each of these papers. The last of these papers will serve as our final “exam” in this class and will be due in my office at the end of our scheduled final exam period.