Academic Advice

[Suu]

Okay, so I just had to play some add/drop origami because my school wanted to charge me an extra 1500 bucks for taking 1 extra class at the main campus, and my religious studies class got dropped...again...(I've been trying to take this course for 2 fucking terms. The prof comes highly recommended by Richter.)

Anyways, in my mad scramble, I just had to settle on Intro to Philosophy to kill the gen-ed for Letters that the other class would have covered.

Now, I've never taken a philosophy class before, well, because it's fucking philosophy, and this is a 100 level class. What kind of bullshit can I expect? Seriously?

Sure, it's "relevant" to my major and all, but I think the Abrahamic Faiths would have been better. Meh.

[Cramulus]

Intro to Philosophy is usually the classics. If you're lucky, it's a quick tour through a lot of different philosophy, and not a semester of reading aristotle, socrates, plato, et cetera.

[Suu]

I'm thinking the quick tour, because there's a separate class for Ancient Philosophy, and it was full. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You're going to get an overview of the history of philosophy and a mini who's-who and who-influenced-who, read some Sartre, some Nietzche, some Borges, and if there's time some Wittgenstein, and then you're going to sit around and wank about what it means and how that meaning was expressed. Oh, and write some papers about what it means and how it's influenced modern thinking.

This is my impression from having fallen in love with countless philosophy majors.

God I hate those fuckers.

[Triple Zero]

I took an extra-curricular Intro to Philosophy class once. It was very interesting while taking it, but in hindsight I didn't really learn anything, too little of everything.

The next year I also took an extra-curricular class on Ethics at the Philosophy faculty. It was also very interesting, and I actually learned a great deal from it that I can even apply in life or at least in arguing with people!

[Suu]

I really wanted to take Ethics, it too, was full.

Not that I need any more help arguing with people. 

Alright, thanks guys. I'm sure that when classes start, I'll have plenty of lulz to share.

[Rumckle]

I found that my 100 level philosophy class didn't focus that much on the classics. There were a couple in there (Hume and Locke spring to mind), but we mainly looked at 20th century philosophers (I remember doing Turing and Searle) (I think the lecturer was not looking to overwhelm students with dense writing).

The problem I had with the class is it was full of people who weren't interested in philosophy and took it as a bludge subject, we had about 300 students in my 100 level class, and then in higher level classes none of them broke 20. So be prepared for some inane and stupid questions.

[Richter]

What's the name of the course?  I took a sinlge 100 level PHL, and it was mostly how to construct arguments, logical fallacies, etc.  Remarkably like algebra conducted without benefit of parentheses.

[Suu]

What's the name of the course?  I took a sinlge 100 level PHL, and it was mostly how to construct arguments, logical fallacies, etc.  Remarkably like algebra conducted without benefit of parentheses.

Just Intro to Philosophy. PHL103 with Professor Krieger.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm taking Philosophy 195 Crit Think: Sci & the Occult

This should be fun! I hope there is at least one Wiccan and one Satanist in the class.

[Luna]

I'm taking Philosophy 195 Crit Think: Sci & the Occult

This should be fun! I hope there is at least one Wiccan and one Satanist in the class.

Man, there just weren't classes like this...  I gotta go back one of these days.

[LMNO]

From what I remember in my intro to philosophy class (back in '91! ), we wallowed with the Greeks, hit Descartes pretty hard, and then kind of tapered off when we got to the more modern wankers thinkers.  Or maybe I stopped paying attention, as I dropped out of college at the end of that year to go play punk rock.

If you want to get anything out of it, I'd try to temporarily forget everything you know about philosophy, and try to understand the source material as if it were REAL TROOF™.  Otherwise, you'll just get all meta.

[Cain]

Despite doing three years of philosophy, I never once did an "introduction to Philosophy" course.  The closest was probably my Intro to Ethics course, which was "meh" and I never attended it anyway (its alright, I checked and there was no ethical obligation to attend classes).

I suspect such a class would go Socrates-Plato-Aristotle-Augustine (maybe)-Aquinas (Maybe)-Montaigne (maybe)-Machiavelli (maybe) - Bacon (maybe) - Descartes - Locke - Hume - Kant - Hegel - Kierkegaard - Nietzsche.

Intro classes are nothing if predictable.  The only problem is the late medieval/early renaissance has few really well recognized philosophers, so they might just fill it with recognizable names, or avoid it altogether.

[minuspace]

Yea, I'd say they round-up a bunch of the usual suspects with some bias on 18th/19th C. Culprits.  Keeping more of the classics aside, they'll prolly start w/ Descartes and the "cogito ergo sum".  From there they can go in different directions, addressing the nature of self, freedom and responsibility, and what makes an argument logically sound...  All this primed for analytical thinking and law degrees, I think?

[Cain]

Well, there is a generally analytic bias within the Anglophone philosophy world, anyway.  It seems to have more to do with academic politics and publishing than any other reason, but yeah.