Plan for Introduction to Philosophy, Fall 2024

I'm putting together a philosophy class and I thought you might like to see the plan.

For this Introduction to Philosophy class, I ask that you read Sophocles' "Antigone" and Plato's "Apology of Socrates." We will spend half the course on both texts. After that, I would like to talk about epistemology (theory of knowledge) and various approaches to ethics.

You're probably wondering what this is supposed to accomplish. I imagine my fellow philosophy professors have raised their eyebrows. Why start with seminar-style readings and then move to a topical approach? What is the plan? What do I hope to accomplish?

The plan is to establish critical examination of an artifact as fundamental. "How does this work?" seems an eminently practical question, far away from one like "What is the nature of morality?" or "Does God exist?" But when we start reading Sophocles and Plato, the primary question I'd like you to ask is how these dramas work. For example, if you're asking how the scenes where Antigone and Ismene fight are compelling, you're wondering about what interested other audiences. What, in other words, is universal and what is not. Something similar holds for asking about Socrates' attitude toward religion. The truth is that theoretical questions underlie our practical ones. The really tough inquiry is why we learn to stop posing good questions.

Once you've got a taste of asking "How does this work?" with two massively influential classics, we will change to a more modern approach. How do we define knowledge? Is it true, justified belief? In what sense can we have knowledge if we can't refute radical skepticism? As you work through these questions, my hope is that you will have questions about the questions. We will end the class with a discussion of various approaches to ethics. Utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics each have different definitions of what is good, definitions that cannot easily be reconciled. By this point, you should not only know how to explain a philosophical idea, demonstrating how it succeeds and fails, but show someone else how to work through the framework accompanying that idea.

So yeah. The plan is ambitious and this is a short course. But if you get the skill of asking "What is this? How does it work?" you're well on your way to being more than a student of philosophy. There's no reason why we can't be reading your work as an exemplar of human wisdom, complete with its successes and failures.