Week 4 Blogging

For this week I want you to post a one or two sentence summary of your topic and which book essay or essays you will be using. For your peer reviews, I'd like you to read your peer's topics and make some suggestions to them as far as direction or other sources. Perhaps you know someone they could interview successfully or you've read something related in the news recently. Blogs are about connecting and sharing information so share something relevant with several people. Try to make sure everyone gets at least two ideas.

Week 3 What is Reality?

Now that you've read more about Descartes and his difficult theory, respond to the following quote:

To rest in the apparent and to mistake it for the real is the one general error, root of all others and the cause of all our stumbling and suffering, to which man is exposed by the nature of his mentality.

--Sri Aurobindo (Indian mystic and creator of yoga)

Week 2 How Do I Know What I Know?

Do you tend to follow your life more from Descartes' (French pronunciation Day-cart) Rationalist view that things gathered from your senses aren't the entire truth, or from John Locke's Empirical view that the senses give us all of the information we need? Why? How?

"I am, I exist, that is certain." Rene Descartes

"For since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate objects but its own ideas, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them."
-- John Locke

HUM 2730 Welcome and Instructions

We'll be trying out a new format for our HUM 2730. Blogging! Philosophy lends itself to discussion and thought at many times during the day when we are not "in class". Blogging will allow you to make comments as they occur to you and think through where you stand on various issues and your process for coming up with your values.

Each week you'll be required to blog about the topics for the week (see syllabus for details). To make this not an additional time requirement but instead to allow you some freedom for thought and expression in your daily lives, we'll be aiming to be out of class by 7:30 so that you can use class time for blogging.

INSTRUCTIONS - Blog at least twice during each week - once with your initial thoughts on the assignments topics and then again, after you've read the week's essays and have more thoughts on the matter. Please respond to your peers' blogs as well so that you are prepared for our class discussion as well

Week One - What the Heck am I studying Philosophy for anyway???

Write your initial thoughts on blogging with philosophy and perhaps your thoughts on the initial readings here. A good question to start with: Do you agree or disagree with Socrates' decision to accept his punishment? Would you have made the same decision? Why or why not?