Readings for Thursday, September 13th are below in PDF format. I'm hoping that you know how to rotate these readings so that you don't have to turn your computer on its side to read them. I'd like you to prepare (write them down beforehand) 3 questions or comments on your reading of the "Mythological World View". For the "Natural Philosophers" section, please take notes on the three major philosophers described---good notes in your notebook that capture the most important aspects of the different philosophies of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles.
______________________________________________________________________
Homework for Wednesday, September 19.
download, if possible, the Plato pdf that follows and mark the important parts with a pen as you go through it, then copy the most salient notes on Plato into your notebook
_________________________________________
Homework for Friday, October 5th.
If you need to either re-draft or do the original writing for this prompt, please do so for Friday's class:
In my dealings / relationships with others, what principle(s) do I operate by?
Please type your response (minimum 1 page or @250 words) Untyped submissions will not be accepted. You may be called upon to read your response aloud.
You might begin reviewing your notes on your / our readings of the Greek philosophers for a test on Friday October, 12th. The study guide for this test is in this link---
What to study for your first philosophy test.
1. The Eleatic Philosophers...they are natural philosophers--they are also called the Pre-Socratics--what does that mean---what were their philosophical projects?
Parmenides--a detailed account of his view of the world.
Heraclitus---his view of the world ( c&c to Parmenides )
Empedocles---a detailed account of his world view ( how did he reconcile Parmenides and Heraclitus? )
2. Who were the Sophists? What were their beliefs? What was Socrates problem with them? (see also pg.83.)
3. Socrates.
his relationship to Plato.
what is Socratic discussion. what is Socratic irony?
what are some of the parallels between Socrates & Jesus?
explain the role of Reason in Socrates vision of how to live a good life.
4. Plato.
what was Plato’s philosophical project?
( p.83 )
be able to explain Plato’s “theory of ideas.”
be able to explain what “true knowledge” is for Plato and how it can be achieved.
how does the Myth of the Cave reflect Plato’s views of a dual reality?
how would Plato’s “ideal state” be organized and governed?
5. The Apology
How does Socrates divide his argument and how doe she set about to answer the two charges lodged against him at his trial?
6. Aristotle.
what are Aristotle’s key achievements?
what are the key differences between Aristotle and Plato?
what was Aristotle’s view of form and substance?
what was Aristotle’s views on ethics and politics?
describe Aristotle’s invention in logic. How did he organize nature and what position do humans occupy and why?
________________________________________
Homework for Wednesday, October 10th.
If you are planning to submit for the first time or resubmit any of these items that have already been graded, they must be given to me by class on Wednesday, Oct. 10th. These assignments are listed directly below for your convenience:
Take detailed notes in your notebook on---
The Natural Philosophers (pgs. 30-39, Sophie's World)
The Philosophy of Athens (pgs. 60-69, Sophie's World)
Plato's Academy (pgs. 81-92, Sophie's World)
Mark up & annotate the handout on "The Matrix."
Mark-up & annotate The Apology of Socrates (we devided it into two parts, so there will be two separate grades for this.)
_________________________________________
Homework for Thursday, October 18, 2007
Read the first section of the Kierkegaard comic book (pgs. 1-29) and in your notebook...
1. Respond to your first reading on Kierkegaard (This is entirely open-ended and up to you, but make it interesting.)
2. As a way of coming away from this reading with some hard kernals of information that might remain in your consciousness for a while, dig out the best answers you can for the following questions from pages 1-29.
1. How does the Bible story of Abraham & Isaac mirror Kierkegaard's own life situation?
2. What is K.'s "method of indirect communication"
a. explain what it is & why he uses it.
b. who were this method's other two exemplars & give examples of how they used it.
c.What is the purpose of "indirect communication"?
Please also read and annotate (mark up & record margin comments) on the next section "Objective and Subjective Truth" pgs. 32-39 only!!
_____________________________________
Homework for Monday, October 22
Please annotate (mark up & make comments in margin) all of the second hand-out on Kierkegaard and, on a separate sheet of paper, write down 3 questions you have for each section of this second handout: section 1 is "Objective and Subjective Truth," section 2 is "Death and Existence," and section 3 is "Consciousness is the Problem"-these questions might have to do with things you don't understand in a particular section or they might be questions the answers to which would nicely capture the truly important things to remember in that section. They shouldn't be questions like "What book did Camus Write?" which have easy factual answers, nor should they be about anything you can easily look up on "the internets," as Dubya would say. These questions should be useful in organizing the things
you need to remember or in advancing your knowledge base.
_______________________________________
Homework for Tuesday, October 24
Please annotate (mark up and make comments in the margin) the handout from Evelynn Underhill's 1911 classic Mysticism. I'd like you to read from page 5, starting with the words "Let us begin..." and concluding at the top of page 17, with "...(3) to a hopeless but strictly logical skepticism."
Underhill is explaining here the three classic attitudes or approaches that have been taken to the problem of whether and how we can know "reality." These approaches are the materialist, the idealist, and the skeptical schools of thought. Making sure that you understand where each of these schools stands on whether and how we can know reality,
write a one page typed response to your reading that lays out where youstand in this matter--be sure to use the concepts you've just read about: Do you consider yourself a materialist, an idealist, or a skeptic? Why?
___________________________________________________
Homework for Tuesday, October 30.
none. relax a bit. smell the roses.
______________________________
Homework for Wednesday, Nov. 7th.
Please bring in your copy of Sophie's World (yes, I am finally collecting them!)
Read and annotate your copy of the Kierkegaard comic strip "The Ethical Stage." I will collect this as a homework grade next class. It's possible I may give a quiz to see who is ethically commited to reading this piece.
______________________________
Homework For Friday, November 9
Read and annotate up to "GUILTY!!!"
in "The Religious Stage" handout--that's about five or six pages in. Again, I may give a quiz in order to determine who among you might be a Kierkegaardian "Knight of Faith,"--someone who believes homework should be done.
______________________________
Homework for Tuesday, November 20
Read and annotate the "Existentialism" handout, then create a list of the top six tenets that you think Existentialism espouses
based on your reading of the handout.
_________________________________
Homework for Thursday, November 29
Finish reading the "Rebellion" chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, and then write a one page typed response to this question:
Do you agree/disagree with Ivan Karamazov's argument/perspective?
(Perhaps another way of saying this is--Are you convinced by his argument?)
Explain why or why not.
________________
Homework for Wednesday, December 5.
Read "Existentialism"--the handout that talks about existentialism as a therapy and be prepared to answer the question on a quiz next class: In what way can Existentialism be considered a therapy? ( another way of construing this question is to ask "What went wrong in Western culture, and why, and how does existentialism try to address the problem?"
______________________________
Homework for Friday, December 7th.
Read "A Clean , Well-Lighted Place" and answer the following questions in some good detail:
1. Which character do you think Hemingway wants us to admire in this story--explain why you believe this.
2. What does the young waiter value in life? What does the older waiter value?
(Another way of thinking of this question is--where would they sit on Kierkegaard's stages of life continuuum and why?)
3. What is the symbolism of the older waiter's reciting the "Our Father" the way he does?
4. Why do you think the older waiter willl not allow music in his clean and pleasant place?
5. Assume the title has a vast significance--what could it symbolize, existentially speaking, now that you've read the story!
___________________________
Homework for Tuesday, December 11.
Those who were absent on Friday should bring in their worksheets for and a copy of the story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
___________________________
No homework for Thursday, Dec 13
___________________________
Homework for Monday, Dec. 17
Using especially "The Themes of Existentialism" handout and maybe "The Existentialism As Therapy" handout, begin to plot out your ideas for a paper on "The Seventh Seal, " remembering that you can access the movie script on- line and actually read word for word what the specific scenes that you are interested in focusing in have to say. You'll be able to quote from them, too.
______________________________
Homework for Friday, December 21
Your paper for The Seventh Seal is due
_____________________________
Second Semester----------------------
For Tuesday, February 19th.
Finish our cumulative reading of Becker by reading and annotating "The Invisible World" section of "Culture: The Relativity of Hero Systems" and then answer the following question:
Of what use to you is this vision*?
*(By "vision," I guess I mean the cumulative ideas on society and culture that Becker offers us in these chapters but especially emphasizing his ideas in this last chapter.)
Your answer should be one page typed --something you can read aloud to the group as a statement and that I can collect for a grade.
______________________________
For Thursday, February 21th
Read "Franny & Zooey" by this date---there will be an evaluation! (a test of 15 plot questions). Look the book over a final time before the test to get the best grade.
_______________________________
For Wednesday, April 2.
Read and annotate the Matrix philosophy essay you choose from the website (enter
"Philosophy and the Matrix" and look for "whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com"). For next class, be prepared to share those facets of your reading that you feel will be most useful to your classmates in coming to a fuller appreciation of the philosophical aspects of the Matrix. Your remarks/ presentation should be between 3-5 minutes.
_________________________________
For Friday, April 4.
Read and annotate the handout "Computers, Caves, and Oracles: Neo and Socrates." Be prepared to share a little of what you learned from this essay about "Matrixy" concerns with the class.
_________________________________
Homework for Tuesday, April 8
Hey, no homework!
__________________________________
Homework for Thursday, April 10
Please read and annotate Part 1 and Part 2 of
Plato's Apology, "the greatest story never told," in which Socrates attempts to defend himself from the capital charges lodged against him in court.
By asking you to annotate this story as you read, I'm trying to get you to slow down and really follow Socartes' argument as he tries to refute the specific charges that have been made against him.
Part 1 runs from the opening to the end of the first paragraph on page 6, where he says that he is "...in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god." Part 2 runs from page 6 to the top of page 14, the last sentence of which reads"...I shall never alter my ways , not even if I have to die many times."
Some of you will be able to read this easily on your own, while others can benefit from the LibriVox recording by Father Zeile of Detroit. Those who can use the "voiceover" should google 'LibriVox Apology Plato" or go to the following website: "ttp://librivox.org/the-apology-of-socrates-by-plato/
and play Parts One and Two, approximately 20 and 22 minutes respectively.
Either way, come to class with a good sense of how Socrates defends himself.
____________________________________
Homework for Monday, April 14.
Read and annotate the conclusion of Part 3 of "The Apology" (pages 14-20 of the handout) and the next and final section of handout, the one that starts with "Socrates' Comments on his Sentence." Try to understand and follow the argument that Socrates is making.
___________________________________
Homework for Wednesday, April 16.
Read pages 21-53 of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Come to class with some a good knowledge of what's in those pages so that we can have a good conversation about the book. We will tie this into our study of the Stoics.
____________________________________
Homework for Friday, April 18.
Read pages 54-83 of Man's Search for Meaning by
Victor Frankl.
____________________________________
Homework for Tuesday, April 29.
Read from 83-115 (the end!) of Man's Search for Meaning
____________________________________
Homework for Monday, May 5th
Read and annotate pages 3-27 of Epictetus's Manual (the handout I gave you). Be prepared to discuss what caught your attention in these pages during class discussion on Monday.
____________________________________
Homework for Wednesday, May 7th
Read and annotate "Introduction to Stoic Ethics: A Public Talk by Dr. Jan Garret." Be prepared to discuss what you learned from reading and thinking about Garret's version of Stoic values.
____________________________________
Homework for Friday, May 9th.
Write a personal essay in which you respond to Frankl's book, Man's Search For Meaning. More specifically, I'm interested in hearing about your reaction to the book, about parts that moved you, that caused you to think, that stayed with you even after the reading was done. Maybe there were issues raised in the book that you want to air out a bit through writing. Go to where your questions and emotions were aroused in the book and write about them. You may want to choose three aspects of the book and write about each in turn, as in a 5 paragraph essay, or you may mediatate on one point and go deep into it.
Either way or any way, I'd like you to write a fluid, well-organized 500 word essay of personal response to Frankl's book. It should be creatively titled, and the hard copy is due Friday, May 9th. x/100 W. In addition, please also email me an electronic version of your paper as an attachment. My address is wmccarthy@mvyps.org
_____________________________________
Homework for Wednesday, May 21
The Seventh Seal and Existentialism
The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, 1956) is ranked #42 on the top 100 movies of all times by an international group of critics. It has also been widely viewed as one of the definitive expressions of an existential sensibility.
In a 300-word essay, due next class, discuss the following proposition: Drawing on ideas gleaned from the thinkers and artists we've studied of late (see below), discuss The Seventh Seal as a film that is representative of existentialist concerns and beliefs about the world. Another way of thinking of this assignment is to connect
the film thematically to several of the works below and write about those connections--that ought to be Existentialist enough for me.
_________________________________________
Works we’ve studied / talked about.
>Camus: Myth of Sisyphus
>Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning
>Stoic beliefs about the world as evidenced in Epictetus
>Hemingway: “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”
>Historical emergence of Existentialism/ Existential
themes handout.
_________________________________________
This short essay (you may write legibly if you can't type it) is an effort to make apparent and concrete what you have learned about Existentialism these past several weeks. Here are the names of the prinipal roles in the film.
If you need to take a look at the any of the dialogue in the film, enter "The Seventh Seal" + screenplay as a search (You should have no problem finding it.)
Director Ingmar Bergman
CAST
Jöns, the squire Gunnar Björnstrand
Death Bengt Ekerot
Jof (Joseph) Nils Poppe
Antonius Block, the knight Max von Sydow
Mia (Mary) Bibi Andersson
Lisa, Plog’s wife Inga Gill
The witch Maud Hansson
Karin, the knight’s wife Inga Landgré
The squire’s girl Gunnel Lindblom
Raval, the seminarist Bertil Anderberg
The monk Anders Ek
Plog, the smith Åke Fridell
The church painter Gunnar Olsson
Skat Erik Strandmark
_________________________________________
Final Assignment: Philosophy Spring ‘08
After watching Groundhog Day, I’m asking you to pour the contents of this film through the sieve of the web (how ‘bout that for mixing metaphors) of philosophic consciousness you have developed in this class over this past semester to see what nuggets (of relationship, of connection) appear, and then to write about them in a 500 word essay. Whether you run with three separate nuggets and discuss each in turn in a well-organized 5 paragraph essay, or whether you take one connection to the philosophical content of the course and go deep with it is up to you. I’m interested in seeing what kind of connections you can make between film and course content, and those that make the most interesting and sophisticated and defensible connections and who write well about them, will
earn the highest grades.
For those who will be here for the exam, I’d like you to bring your essays to our final meeting next Friday and to be prepared to share them with the rest of the class in our customary Socratic discussion mode. Your exam grade will be 1/2 essay, 1/2 participation.
I’d still like to see a paper from those who are not required to attend the exam. You need only submit it to me by e-mail. It will be counted as your last major grade of the semester.
If you find yourself high and dry for ideas even after you’ve read the course summary sheet I passed out last class, you may want to do a little research on the internet, perhaps mixing the film’s title with philosophy or religion or even something more specific as a search strategy. The only thing I’d ask you to do if you use this approach is to credit your source(s) somewhere in your paper.
Please creatively title your paper, italicize or underline the titles of films and whole books, and proof it for spelling or grammar errors and sentence construction before you submit it.
Thanks. It was a sincere pleasure having you as students. I hope you found some things in this course useful or interesting. Drop me a line if you take a philosophy course in college, or just drop me a line anyway. Adios!
Mr. McCarthy
P.S. Have you all given me the 300 word Seventh Seal essay?
_________________________________________
Below is the course summary you should use as your "Sieve"!
Topics in Philosophy for Spring 2008
Ernest Becker is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, and also a dozen other books, including The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Nature of Man, a book that we read several chapters of in early February. Essentially, Becker sees humans as creatures of self-esteem, who consensually create an elaborate social fiction called culture, which when it functions ideally, allows each individual to feel that he/she is a primary object of value in world of meaning.
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger is the story, at least when seen through the lens of Becker’s book, of a young college student who becomes hyperaware of this human condition of desperate esteem-seeking, falls into despair about its neediness, and is helped by family members (and The Fat Lady) into gaining a new perspective, a new breadth of vision about what Andre Malraux would call “la condition humaine”--the human condition. (The English translation of the title of Malraux’s book La Condition Humaine is Man’s Fate --it’s an interesting read.)
We studied (and took notes on) the Pre-Socratics in Sophie’s World, especially Heraclitus (you can’t step into the same river twice: neither you nor the river will be the same) and Parmenides (there is no movement; all is stasis: Zeno’s paradox of the arrow that can’t go half way there until it goes 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc. of the way there).
Then we turned our attention to Plato, who tried to reconcile Parmenides and Heraclitus by splitting the world into a dichotomy, positing a world of forms and a world of senses, one of which is eternal, while the other flows/changes all the time. This was described in “The Allegory of the Cave.” The philosopher, for Plato, is the person who has glimpsed the eternal world (the truth) and can thus serve as a guide (a wise person) for those of us still chained up in the sensual world of shadows. We also read Plato’s “Apology,” which was the story of Socrates’ trial. Socrates’ life was portrayed as “the greatest story never told.” He remains the figure par excellence of the philosopher, living a life devoted to truth and virtue, uncorrupted by the material seductions of society, and
especially in Socrates’ case, shattering the poorly made but avidly embraced assumptions of his Athenian contemporaries in an effort to get them to step out of the shadows of their ignorant opinions and attitudes about life and “to wake up and smell the coffee”of living lives that were truly worthy and virtuous.
The Sophists (as we heard on The Rhetoric 10 recordings from UC Berkeley) didn’t believe in Plato and Socrates’ “truth” thing. They saw the world as an endless series of rhetorical struggles (the world as argument) and they taught their students only how to win arguments. For them, “truth” was a naive belief that describes a world of certainties that does not exist. The point for them was to win arguments; they didn’t care about “the truth.”
In viewing The Matrix, we treated the persistence of this Platonic belief in a sensual world--a world of illusion--and a world of ideas or forms that lies behind this sensual world and which is the real world. Once again, we raised the issue of what to do, of how to behave, in a fabricated, invented world (see Becker), a world that may be constructed out of erroneous beliefs and assumptions and attitudes that, while prevalent, are nonetheless matters of choice that are based on error or misperception or misreading.
With the Stoics, we read excerpts from Epictetus’s Manual and an internet paper on things that are indifferent and preferred [and how the Stoic system trained individuals to endorse or not endorse the emotions they naturally feel, thereby gaining a center of control over their lives (you are not what you feel; you are what you decide to do about what you feel)]. This, I think, naturally led us into considering Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus,” an important Existential statement, which placed emphasis on the individual’s consciousness/awareness of his absurd and despairing situation (think Franny, perhaps) and on what attitudes (and resulting actions) might help him to make of his life “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”(Hemingway). Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
offered deeper Existential confirmation of how free choice and meaning intersect in a life lived even under the harshest conditions of outward oppression and determination, a concentration camp.
Finally, The Seventh Seal examined the absurdity and death-haunted landscape of an Existentialist world view--the setting of a 14th Century plague-ravaged and God-abandoned Sweden offering a distant mirror to our own troubled (world on the brink of nuclear annihilation in 1956) era and explored how an individual came to perform a significant act in an effort to overcome his alienation (from God, from other human beings) and to make his life meaningful.
The handout on “Existential Origins and Themes” emphasizes the “absolute freedom” which Jean Paul Sartre (the leading French Existential philosopher, b.1905 - d.1980) sees as the definition of an individual. We come to know ourselves, we create ourselves through our freedom at all moments to choose the way we will act in a given situation. We must choose and we alone are responsible for all of our choices. Blaming other people or situations is “bad faith,” and makes our lives “inauthentic.”