Welcome to the course!
This course has two main goals. First, it will introduce you to some of the key topics and historical episodes in Western philosophy. We'll discuss several of the key questions that Western intellectuals have thought about. We'll read some of the key historical articles, and examine the reasons for thinking that various proposed answers to these questions are right or wrong.
To give you a taster, here are some of the questions we'll be examining:
Second, this is a course in critical thinking. The key tool in philosophy is the argument - roughly, one tries to persuade others (or oneself!) that a certain statement (for example, 'Capital punishment is morally wrong') is true, by finding reasons for believing that statement, and explaining how the reasons support the conclusion you want to draw from them. Throughout the course, we'll learn more about what philosophers mean by the term 'argument', and how 'arguments' in this sense can be used to clarify and advance debates. The two paper assignments will give you practice in analyzing and criticizing arguments, and in constructing arguments to defend your own views.
Very often, people think that, outside of science, there is no such thing as proof; they further think that, if there is no proof, then any answer is as good as any other answer, one chooses one's beliefs simply as a matter of faith, and nothing can be said to persuade someone of a different opinion that their opinion is probably not correct. If one believes this 'faith vs. proof' picture, it gives a good excuse not to bother thinking, since it entails that every issue is either cut-and-dried or completely unresolvable; but the picture is far too simplistic. We'll see that reasons, often very persuasive reasons, can be given even for religious (or areligious!) beliefs, or beliefs about what is morally right and wrong. (On the other hand, we'll also see some reasons for thinking that the idea of 'proof' in science is not quite as straightforward as it seems!)