Syllabus
Weekly dialogue topics:
Week 1 (First dialogue question): Introduce yourself to the others in the
class.
Week 2: What
do you think is the meaning of Socrates’ maxim “The unexamined life is not worth
living”? How does it relate to philosophy?
Week 3: I was thinking about using question 1 from page 97 ed. 11, or 99 ed. 10 or 130
ed. 9. It reads:
“Suppose that your soul could survive death. But suppose that at death your
soul loses all memory of its past life, and all the memories of who and what you
were are completely erased from your soul. Suppose, also, that all personality
traits, beliefs, desires, preferences, and all other conscious qualities are
erased. Will you still exist after death? Explain why or why not.” But two
things come to my mind here. One is that in the Einsteinian Universe all of time
remains in existence. We are traveling through time and it makes coherent sense
to us because we travel at close to the same rate through time as all of our
current experience. But theoretically, we could travel
from time to time, backwards and forwards, much as we travel from place to
place in other dimensions. So our soul will always be as it is through time. We
may even use our quantum computers (mind) to travel into our past (memory) and
into our future (expectation) and can even think as one with others who have the
“same” thoughts. So, in a sense, I wonder if question 1 from page 130 is no
longer a viable question. Another thing that comes to my mind is the concern for
animal minds.
Do animals have souls? It seems whatever answer we give that satisfies our
description of soul will include many mammals and perhaps other animals as well.
But still, I think the question of what death means to us is an important
philosophical question. So, let me ask you, will you still exist after death?
Week 4: Try David
Hume’s “Thought Experiment” and look inward; introspect. (page 96 ed. 11, or 98-99 ed. 10 or 128-129
ed. 9 in
Velasquez but it was deleted from ed. 12) Do you find something
that continues invariably, that endures throughout all of the changes in
experience? Describe your thinking as you do this
experiment.
Week 5: No soul?
Discuss what you think about
the concept of soul.
Week 6: I find the ontological
argument (or a section of it in Velasquez pp. 236-237 ed. 10 or 283-284 in
ed. 9) successful. I think it is
a powerful argument from a postmodern perspective. Do you find it convincing?
Week 7: Have you ever been saved
or had a mystical experience? If you have, how do you know that is what it was?
If you have not, do you hope to? If you have an alternative explanation for what
people mean by this kind of experience, what is it?
Week 8: How much of our world is free for our various cultures to create?
How much must come from our innate human nature? Does the grammar of our
language dictate how reality appears to us? For an interesting and current
examination of this have a look at this result of a study posted in
Discover. It seems our biology has a lot to say about what our cultures can
create. How much is up to you when you choose whom to marry?
Week 9: Do we think of scientists as the new priesthood?
Week 10: I give a quiz on
the first day of class for some courses. The question I ask is: What are the Ten Commandments? I
ask this after the class discusses moral rules or the nature of memory. Usually everyone agrees that we
need a minimum of moral rules for a community to survive. Usually most will
agree that the Ten Commandments or something like them fits that minimum.
Everyone is surprised by the results of the quiz. Visit this
link
to see the statistics I have collected. What do you think should be our moral
rules here in Alaska?
Week 11: I have been doing
Distance courses for at least eighteen years of the twenty years I have been teaching
at UAA. During this time I have seen good
things and bad things about the nature of this medium compared to classroom
instruction. Good things: Students work harder. You have to read more and write
more and this usually means you think more. If you fall asleep in class you may
still do fine. If you fall asleep typing your papers you won't have anything to
send. You can do the work at your convenience. You can do the work even while
out of state. Bad things: no eye contact. How do we know we really understand one
another? I am sure that even while students work harder they are more likely to
misunderstand some aspects of the course and I will either not pick up on the
mistake or be in no better position to help than the text even if I do. Little
interaction among the students though email delayed chat seems to help this.
Another issue: I have not had one semester go by where some aspect of
the technology did not screw up. Email is fast but "sometimes" gets lost. Will we ever
get it right? What do you think
of this kind of course? How do you think a course like this compares to other
classroom courses or Distance courses? What can I do to make the course better?
Please feel completely free to answer
even if you think an answer might hurt my feelings! I can't improve unless I
find out what you think. You might also find my page on this of interest:
http://wsjamison.uaa.alaska.edu/developing.htm