Notes on the Text Links sections:

I have not read everything there is to read in the philosophical tradition. I have been actively reading philosophy texts since at least 1970 and before that I am sure some of what I read was associated with that tradition but I did not know that it was. Please have a look at my own history as a philosophy major if you are interested in a brief essay on how I got into this fix! I do read other things as well, though I sometimes wonder, if Hegel knew everything and told us how to know everything too, why I would be reading anything else while there are still things I have sitting on my shelf that he wrote that I have not read! As you read through the text for this course and the study guide you will more than likely feel overwhelmed by the amount of material that opens up for you! To help make this less difficult I have decided to write even more stuff on this set of web pages! You see how that works? Eventually, everyone has their own opinion on everything! But can you read everyone's opinion on everything? Should you even try? At what point does the whole exercise become pointless?

One solution to this dilemma, which is significantly worse thanks to the Internet, is that you recognize that the nature of the quest, or reaching for an examined life, is that the goal can never be reached -- just as you may feel you can never have enough money! You can always get more! Once you have it all, there's only one thing left, and that's more! So the solution is to think of the quest as an activity. Imagine! Just reading philosophy is a fun activity. Not convinced?

True. I have met students who will read the materials (so they say), sit through classes (asleep?), and tell me they think philosophy is boring, or critique philosophers for thinking too hard about everything all the time. Unlike Socrates, I do not think the unexamined life is not worth living. There are too many people that fit this category and we need them! Where would we be without all the pawns in the chess game of life? As Jesus said, "the poor you will always have with you." It is a relative thing. To have elite educated people you need also the bottom of the heap. But it is clear that those who learn more have a better quality of life and to a great extent do this at the expense of those that are not as well educated. So the question I have for you is, where do you plan to fit in yourself? Among those who are the best educated or among those who are the pawns?

That being said, (assuming you agree with it or not) how do you handle so much reading material? How do you cope with all the things that people say are important for you to know when you have so much to do and so little time to do it?

I view philosophy as the attempt to know as much as possible about everything so that the quality of our lives (not just mine) is the best humanly, and perhaps divinely, possible. To do this there must be a plan and an order to what is there to be known. As we become more and more saturated with information, it becomes even more important to keep to a plan. We may stray from the plan when it interests us, but it is also clear that others have gone before us. Keeping to the tradition of passing on the tradition, they construct plans for us to follow. Velasquez has done a masterful job and I hope you can keep to his plan. I am sure you will find it well worth the effort.

For those that find the material he has made available insufficient for their hunger for information I have links from my class notes page to my own lectures and those lectures have links to complete texts from which Velasquez draws many of his selections.

Good luck!