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| hope college > academic departments > philosophy |
Current Philosophy CoursesSearch via KnowHope Plus. SPRING 2010 Course Descriptions
PHIL 200-01A INFORMAL LOGIC PHIL 200-01B INFORMAL LOGIC Students will learn about arguments by addressing arguments that have been offered by philosophers. Throughout this course, students will be asked to use an understanding of basic logic to formulate and criticize line-by-line arguments taken from philosophy texts. With respect to the basic logic, students will learn some common valid argument forms. They will learn what an argument is, what validity is, what soundness is. They will also learn truth tables. They will learn how arguments may be convincing or unconvincing (since an argument may be unconvincing even if valid and sound). They will learn some traditional fallacies of reasoning (e.g., false analogy, post-hoc, etc.). Students will learn to extract, explain, and evaluate arguments. Extracting an argument involves putting an argument in an explicit form. Explaining it involves finding support from the text for each premise in the argument. Evaluating the argument involves testing it for validity and then assessing whether it is sound or convincing, and if not why not. Although the material from which we clarify and criticize arguments will be philosophical material, the primary aim of the course will to gain familiarity with how fruitfully to address an argument. So it is a course in analytical reasoning. This course may be of some help to you if you plan to take a standardized
test, such as the LSAT, that has a section on analytical reasoning. It
will also be of interest to philosophers (both because of the philosophical
arguments we address and because of the focus on reasoning), or practitioners
of other disciplines that use a lot of arguments, and to people who are
just interested in arguments and reasoning. PHIL 230-01 Note: This course counts toward fulfillment of Cultural Heritage requirements. In this course we will examine ancient western philosophy,
beginning with the Greeks. Plato, a pupil of Socrates, wrote dialogues
in which Socrates often appears as the main character. They are conversations
like the ones that we have, but they are based on a certain question,
like “what is justice?” We will read a number of Plato’s
dialogues, and then consider Plato’s own student, Aristotle. Not
only were these two figures enormously influential for the Greek and
Roman thinkers that followed them, among them, the Stoics (of whom we
will read Epictetus), but their influence extends to two towering figures
in the history of theology as well as philosophy, namely St. Augustine
and St. Thomas Aquinas. We will finish the course by considering the
philosophical contributions made by these last two figures. We’ll even ask: PHIL 231-01 (Cross-listed with REL 369-03 - register under PHIL 231-01) This course is an introduction to Western philosophy during the Middle Ages, a period that has been referred to as “the Age of Faith.” In this course we will trace the interplay of religion and philosophy, faith and reason in the development of Christian philosophy in such figures as Augustine, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Such Jewish and Islamic philosophers as Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, and Algazali will also be discussed. In addition to the relationship between faith and reason, other topics to be discussed include the nature and existence of God, the problem of evil, the immortality of the soul, the nature of knowledge, the nature of happiness and virtue, and the inner journey of the soul to God.
PHIL 232-01 MODERN PHILOSOPHY Note: This course counts toward fulfillment of Cultural Heritage requirements. This course is an introduction to western philosophy as seen particularly
in the works of the "modern" philosophers. The texts are not
easy, but the questions they are asking are as deep and as important
as they come. Here are some: We'll even ask: • If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Readings will be from Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others. PHIL 342-01 We will examine such thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke on the rise of modern democracy; the ideas surrounding the American and French Revolutions; and the challenges to liberal democracy put forward by Rousseau and Marx on such issues as: human nature, the good life, the role of government, the relation between the individual and the government, the meaning of freedom, the need for social order. We will also investigate how modern political thought differs from ancient and medieval views. PHIL 344-01 This course will look at the development of ethical theory in the 20th century. We will begin by considering the main ethical theories of the Enlightenment (those of Hume, Kant and Mill) and responses to those theories in the late 19th and early 20th century by Existentialists and Pragmatists. We will then consider the rise and fall of “meta-ethics” within English-speaking “analytic” philosophy as well as the retrieval of earlier “normative” ethical theories, including natural law theory and virtue ethics. Finally, we will consider the challenges of relativism and feminism to ethical theory, and the relationship between religion and morality. While our main focus will be ethical theory, applications to select moral problems will be considered throughout the course. PHIL 373-01 PHIL 490 (written permission of professor required) Prerequisite: Departmental approval of a student proposed project prior to enrollment in the course. Such a project might be an internship; but in any case it would include a significant piece of philosophic writing. A student intending to enroll in PHIL 490 should plan ahead to study with the professor whose expertise and interests most clearly correspond to the student’s interests and intentions.
IDS 171-02 - Cultural Heritage I In Greece, the fifth century B.C. begins with a war (the Persian Wars), which Athens was instrumental in winning, and it ends with a war (the Peloponnesian War), which Athens lost. Throughout this time, Athens develops a flourishing, contentious democracy which contributes to a period of great innovation and turmoil. We see experimentation in self-government, military innovations, new and extraordinary approaches in art and architecture, significant advances in mathematics and science. In this atmosphere of freedom and power, there emerged the literary forms known as tragedy and comedy. In this class, while looking at the history of 5th century Greece and the rise of Athenian democracy, we will explore the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes, and the comedies of Aristophanes. We will investigate how these dramatic forms are used to consider such basic human concerns as freedom, its possibilities and its limits, what in our lives we control and what we don't control, the nature of human responsibility, the relations between gods and humans, the relations between men and women, the uses and abuses of power, the promises and dangers of sex and love, the struggles to realize justice, conflicts between duties to family and duties to city, what makes for a happy life. And throughout the course, we will ask, what, if any, connections might exist between the struggles of the Greeks 2500 years ago and our efforts to live today in 2009.
IDS 171-06 In this course, we will be keeping our eyes on ethical questions, particularly those pertaining to sex and gender, power, and still more broadly, how to live well. The readings for this course are in large part classics, texts that have through the ages been regarded as masterpieces and transcend their own times, and that have something important to say to people of various times and cultures. We will be looking at literature, philosophy, and history as well as some theology and art; we will be covering these disciplines as they apply to classical Greece and Rome, and then as they apply into the middle ages and the Renaissance, where there is special emphasis on Florence. Because the course proceeds chronologically, we can see in a powerful way how later authors build on earlier ones. Something that particularly excites me about the course is the way it illustrates how Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the West, was born in a classical world and how Christians came to incorporate classical learning and culture from ancient Greece and Rome.
While the French Revolution was one of the major events of modern history, the buildup to it and the fallout from it are of equal interest, and we will examine all three in this course. This section of IDS 172 is a “three-discipline” interdisciplinary course: it will focus on European history, literature, and philosophy from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Special attention will be paid to the intellectual movement known as “the Enlightenment,” to the Revolution itself and the Napoleonic period that ensued, and to the Romantic movement that sprang up alongside the Revolution and continued beyond it. We will read works by such authors as Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, and Hegel; we will study figures like Napoleon and events like the Reign of Terror; and we will see how musical works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert reflect the tendencies of the period to which they belong. Finally, the connections of the main themes of this course to other cultural and historical developments, such as the Scientific Revolution, the American Revolution, and the rise of nationalism, will also be explored. IDS 457-01 An exploration of the Christian spiritual traditions with an emphasis on the integration of prayer and the encounter with God into everyday life. Representative readings from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox sources will investigate characteristic Christian ways of becoming aware of God, of interpreting awareness, and of shaping our lives in response to it. Spring 2010Requirements for the major: (1) PHIL 200 - Informal Logic or PHIL 201 - Logic Total of at least 24 credits in Philosophy (which can include 2 credit courses). Requirements for the minor: (1) PHIL 200 - Informal Logic or COMM 160 or PHIL 201 - Logic
COURSE CATEGORY LISTList II - Knowledge & Reality PHIL 241 - Phil of India & Tibet PHIL 230 - Ancient Philosophy 2-credit class PHIL 195 - Intro to Philosophy Note: Only one (1) cross-listed course (4 credits) offered
by another department may count towards the major and minor.
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