Philosophy lecture series notes
Contents
Background
I'm thinking of maybe 6 ancient/medieval and 6 Renaissance and later philosophers. Another possibility is to do (say) Plato to Kant in the fall and 19th and 20th Century philosophers in the spring.
Philosopher list
Ancient to Enlightenment
- Plato (philosopher)
- Plato (neo-Platonism)
- Aristotle
- Aquinas
- Augustine
- Maimonides
- Montaigne
- Machiavelli
- Descartes
- Locke
- Kant
19th and 20th Centuries
- Hegel
- Nietzsche
- Freud
- Marx
- James and Peirce (pragmatism)
- Existentialism
- Foucault
- Derrida
- Lacan and Deleuze?
- Rorty
--Draulston 22:00, 20 May 2011 (CDT)
Idea List
Not to say this is what we should be doing, but I'm starting the conversation about what ideas would work as substantive and important enough to trace through history. This could be good fodder for future offerings, a future class, or another way to keep track of what we are talking about besides a philosopher-based method.
Thoughts to Consider/Process Notes
Any course or offering like this is going to be limited in scope. We will have to "choose" material from a near endless supply of possibilities, and in that choosing, we will define what we consider important to cover, what will get our attention.
As it stands, the list is quite Western-centric, and it is composed of the philosophers many consider "major," as in, people we perceive as influencing thought. So, let me start with something Dr. Raulston and I were talking about: do you organize by person or by thoughts? Do you trace philosophy by a chronology of thinkers, one after the other, or do you think about the great ideas or the great thoughts of history, and try to trace the big five or six over time? Clearly, this is not an either/or endeavor; if you track people, you track people's ideas and the progression of ideas. But do you start with Kant and talk about ethics, or trace the development of an ethical idea and stop by Kant? One certainly lends itself more easily to making real-life connections. Making real-life connections makes the material more interesting.
Also, do we want this list to be so Western-Centric? What about someone like Confucius, or Avicenna? When we get to the 20th century, to we include influential women (Arendt) or people of color (someone like Du Bois or Franz Fanon?)
These are the decisions any teacher needs to embrace when determining a curriculum, or a canon: what gets left in, what gets left out?
--Ghan 15:36, 25 August 2011 (CDT)
Thinking about thinking about this lecture series
When Rev. Han emailed me querying the Western-centric nature of my tentative list for the philosophy lecture series, I responded with an email I'll post below. I encouraged him to post his query on the Wiki instead of leaving it private for reasons to which he's alluded above and which I (this will surprise those of you who know me lol) present less tactfully in my response to him...
email response to ghan@sjs.org
Sigh. Your points illustrate why it's dangerous to publish a brainstorming idea. I did the lists off the top of my head one day. Also, Thomas told me he wanted information on the "Big Name" philosophers. If I were teaching a course on philosophy, I wouldn't set it up this way at all, but my feeling was that I was trying to respond to a student request, not set up a course myself. I believe (though I may be misremembering) that I specifically asked about a more global perspective and he said no. (I apologize to Thomas if I'm misremembering)
However, having said that, I have no problem with some other names. I don't think a "Big-Name Western Philosophers" course is the best possible intro to philosophy; it's simply the best intro to a series of talks on "Big-Name Western Philosophers" lol. (Actually, the more I've thought about it over the last year since we started talking, the more I think I would do a philosophy course based on ideas rather than names. So many of the philosophers ignored or repudiated others' work that few before Hartshorne tried systematically to construct systems that were based on much besides their own--or a mentor's--views. That's a question for another day, though.)
I would personally be inclined to add Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Avicenna, Buddhism, Taoism, and the Vedanta from the Eastern tradition; I would certainly add Arendt and de Beauvoir as 20th-century women. I would possibly add Simone Weil. I would certainly add Du Bois and probably Cornel West too.
Other women philosophers, who seem to me (with one possible exception) to be less influential (sometimes because more recent, sometimes because much of their work is in other genres): Ayn Rand (though I feel she's more of a political writer than philosopher, but some would disagree); Iris Murdoch (though I see her as more of a novelist whose works are informed by philosophy); Onora O'Neill; Marylin McCord Adams; Linda Martin Alcoff; Mary Warnock;
I don't know enough about people on the latter list, or contemporary professors, to have a strong opinion either way except that I don't sense many of them have a strong influence except on the academic community (with the possible exception of Rand).
Whom else would you like to include?
I would combine Anslem with Aquinas in the Scholastics if you want to add him.
Aristotle could be omitted except as a footnote to Plato (there would a delicious irony in so doing)
One could combine Locke, Hume, and Descartes as "Rationalists" if one wanted. Machiavelli is mostly there because he is such a well-known name; one could have a group of "political philosophers" one day, however.
If you want to recast this idea, somewhat, so that it's more what we'd consider a survey of important philosophical ideas than a survey of Big-Name Western Philosophers, I'm more than happy with that approach. The more I think about it, actually, the less I'd like trying to spend an hour on Kant's intricacies with people who've never read anything of his!
Also, I think the mere fact of our having this discussion provides a useful model of many things. Would you be willing to post your comments on the Wiki? If there is one thing (intellectually) our students need to see more than anything else, in my judgment, it is *modeling* of the process of construction, diffusion, and cultivation of knowledge/learning. It's now so often presented to them pre-digested, and doing so is both highly misleading and may even delay their intellectual growth, I fear.
I would then post this response, and we might get a good discussion going (I'd ask a couple of the other faculty to contribute) that would be educationally valuable even for people who never came to a single talk!
(end of email)
I am reminded of Russell's dictum that the best education is to have passionate intelligent speakers on either side of a question debate it in front of an audience that's interested in the question. In that spirit (among others) I invite informed commentary/discussion/argumentation from anyone in the community as long as the challenges are neither of the ad hominem (e.g., "you're an idiot!" or "how could anyone of intelligence say that?) nor the purely reactive ("any list that doesn't include _____________________ is worthless!) variety.
--Draulston 21:17, 25 August 2011 (CDT)
We've made it to Descartes, now what?
I'm thinking it may be time to switch to movements rather than individuals soon.
Rationalism Descartes Spinoza Leibniz Wolff
Empiricism Bacon Locke Hume
Scepticism Montaigne Pascal Hume
Idealism Berkeley Kant Fichte Schelling Hegel Feuerbach Marx Engels Green, McTaggart, Bradley
Pragmatism Peirce William James John Dewey Santayana Quine Rorty
Phenomenology Husserl Heidegger Merleau-Ponty Sartre
Existentialism Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Sartre DeBeauvoir Camus
Structuralism and Poststructuralism
--Draulston 11:17, 30 October 2011 (CDT)