Does philosophy involve a lot of English? I saw the readings for week 1 and anost mistook it for an English class.
All the readings are in English, so you need to be competent in the language to understand them. For the most part, they aren’t written in an extremely sophisticated style nor are we worried about discussing more subtle nuances for the purposes of this class. But we are counting on you to be able to grasp basic content. And we are here to help you notice crucial distinctions in ideas.
Remember that you are now taking a class in an English speaking university within the Humanities division of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. More generally, you absolutely need to be competent in language to be able to get the most out of an university education. This same point holds if the classes were taught in Swahili or Russian or Babylonian–just swap the language.
If you feel that you aren’t there, then let me encourage you–we can all improve through shameless practice. I did not grow up in an English speaking home environment myself. So keep working! And keep in mind that doing philosophy isn’t really about being good with an upper class sounding use of language. Philosophy can do in Singlish one! The point here is just about being able grasp (enough of) what the readings are saying, and being able to follow the Webinars and Tutorials. And of course, expressing oneself in a clear and intelligible way to your audience.
is there a text book or just independent readings?
Are those asking the good questions well-read or are there readings I missed out on in luminus
Hi prof, are the textbooks we need on co-op or are most content that is going to be tested found in luminus ?
Are the readings uploaded on luminus so far the only ones we have to complete or are there more incoming?
There’s no textbook; all the essential readings are articles or a chapter from a book and will be made available through Luminus. For a humanities module, this class has relatively light reading. There are modules out there that require you to read several whole books for the semester. Philosophy modules tend to prefer students to focus on reading a few items more intensively, than many items more quickly. As of today (15 August), I’ve uploaded all of the essential readings. I might add more optional items.
will we be taught how to extract ideas from readings before we embark on the readings themselves?
Do you have any tips on how we can read complex content quickly? I am a slow reader who takes time to comprehend so I got rather taken aback by the amount of readings
hi prof, do you have any tips on how to efficiently study the readings? they are pretty content-heavy and take a while to understand. are there any note-taking tips you can recommend?
Do we need to print the readings in full and to what extent do we need to be super familiar with the readings in our exam?
Don’t feel as if you need to understand everything the first time you read each reading. Just get the overall drift. Try to see what the author is trying to argue for or how the different parts of the reading are connected to each other. (The small group homework, which starts only from Week 3, asks for your responses. You get your points by discussing with your group and putting down the responses–showing conscientiousness and engagement–rather than by “getting things right”.) The Webinars exist to help you with the ideas and also to tell you where to narrow down your focus–so after attending or reviewing the recording, it’s a good idea to reread the reading. Then the workout of the tutorial and quiz and peer discussion will do the remaining work.
The quizzes can contain things that come directly from the readings (e.g., we tell you to go look at that paragraph on that page and here’s the question). But not the exams. I don’t need you to be “super familiar with the readings” going into the exams. You need to have mastered the concepts introduced in the module, that’s all. The exam is open book in any case (but a lot more about that later).
Something else to remember is that the readings aren’t meant to lay down the canonical truth. They are there to introduce concepts and get the conversation going. With the exception of the first reading, all of them will be pushing hard for a particular position. But our job isn’t to agree with the author, but to use that as the starting point of our own engagement with the topic. I always try to present opposing points of view in the Webinar as well. That said, to engage properly with the topics–at a “doing philosophy” rather than just “learning about philosophy” level–we need to be sufficiently clear about the arguments being presented and the concepts used. We won’t have an informed opinion for or against something (e.g., Peter Singer’s idea that we have a duty to donate a big part of our wealth to denizens of poor countries, or Galen Strawson’s idea that moral responsibility is “essentially impossible”) if we haven’t properly understood what’s being argued.
