Has anyone taken a Philosophy course?

[AutumnAngel]

I have been in a state of shock this past week. I enrolled in a philosophy course for the summer and I have never been more disturbed by this material than any other class that I have taken. I am so out of my element with this stuff. This whole past week our instructor has just been asking us questions about various topics such as who are we? What is knowledge? what is reality?supposedly to help us start "thinking". I think about it all day long while I'm at work. It's just WEIRD. It almost makes me paranoid. My head hurts when I leave his class. It's interesting material but it's also wayyy out there. Does anyone else share the same feelings about this subject?

[BunnyFoo-Foo]

There are just certain people who get the whole philosophy thing and I dont. I took Logic once and failed..what a waste of my precious time...made me feel so dumb.
I am not one for encouraging quitting....but get out if you can....it will warp your mind. Do you have to take it? If so, find a tutor.....

[retdetsgt]

I got my undergrad degree at a Catholic college that required a year of philosophy. I took logic one semester and ethics the other. They were hard as hell, but they did make me think. Try and look at it as a challenge and hang in there. It can be interesting if you allow it.

I found statistics much more daunting... That was before we could use calulators and had to do all those awful equations by hand...
Jim

[FutureEnforcement]

In my sophmore year I took a religous Philosophy class and it had to be one of the greatest classes I've taken in college. The professor was really cool and had some great insights. The final paper we had to do was a 50 page paper, with groups of 4. We had to create our own religion and pretty much create the basis of the religion and all that. It was pretty much create your own myth and I really enjoyed the final paper. I got a 96 on the paper and a 4.0 in the class.

On the other hand a buddy of mine took the same course with a different professor and said it was the worst class ever and got a 2.0. I guess I just got lucky with that course.

[wonderwoman]

I took a Philosophy course and it disturbed me in that I felt the agenda was to dispell anything related to God or Chritianity. However, I must admit my professor was fair. I did my final essay on everything that went against what he had taught for the 4 months and he gave me an A. Surprised the heck out of me.

I remember the class on "how do you know if the chair you are sitting on is still there once you look away"???????

You really have to be open minded and not be afraid of sticking to what you what you believe after you have heard and accessed it all.

[Delta_V]

quote:

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Originally posted by wonderwoman:
I remember the class on "how do you know if the chair you are sitting on is still there once you look away"???????

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I remember a similar discussion in an intro to philosophy course that I took. I guess I'm not much into philosophy, because I really didn't give two ****s whether or not the chair sits still or not. IMO, there are more important things to discuss...things that actually have answers.

I also had to take a Criminal Justice ethics class, which I enjoyed quite a bit more. There wasn't a whole lot of philosophy involved in it though, except for the basic parts of ethics.

[drunkhunter]

I took two of them in college. One of them was great. The other went kind of like your's is going now.

[kirch]

I took a philosophy course my first semester in college. I got a D.

I was new to the whole 'signing up for your classes' thing and I just picked the classes that met my general degree requirements and had the shortest lines (this was back when you had to actually sign up for each class in person -- now it's all done by phone or computer, I'm told).

I soon found out why the line was so short. It was the dullest class I ever took. And the subject matter was way over my head -- Proofs for and Against the Existence of God, Existentialism and Transcendtalism, etc.

I still remember the material we had to read, though. It went like this:

"sldklk lkjssd wpoeir vpw ;sd;p[owmfs;l ;lkasd-9234m -ms-w0ek;sldmf[ [weklwmw[okew[ekr."

Or at least, that's what it looked like to me.

What really irked me is that my roommate took another class the next semester called Social Ethics. It also met the philosophy requirement. He had a cool teacher and they spent their classtime talking about current issues and the philosophical ideas behind them. It was the first time I realized how much difference a good teach can make.

[jeeper]

I took a social ethics and a philosophy class. I LOVED the social ethics, we had some wicked arguments...er I mean discussions. The regular philosophy class was taught by a anarchist pothead and we didn't exactly see eye to eye on anything.

[Choppy]

Usually the reason people get mentally occupied with the questions in a philosphy class is just because they haven't thought about them before. In order to get through life we make a whole lot of assumptions - often the point of these classes is to challenge these assumptions. Godel's theorum (basically) states that within a given set of rules that are used to explain something - there will always be an assumption - something which you must declare as true (rather than prove true). Philosphers root out these assumptions and challenge them.

The biggest trick in philosphy is learning how to present your arguments.

[ProWriter]

quote:

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This whole past week our instructor has just been asking us questions about various topics such as who are we? What is knowledge? what is reality?supposedly to help us start "thinking". I think about it all day long while I'm at work. It's just WEIRD.

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That stuff comes more under the branch of Philosophy they call Metaphysics, as opposed to Classical Philosophy and Symbolic Logic.

CP and SL are both kind of boring unless you have an academic interest in it. Metaphysics and Ethics are both more useful for people who use it as a tool to refine the way they analyze issues in general than it is to people who view it as just a "course" and don't try to apply it to life outside the class room. The type of issues they discuss in Ethics classes is exactly the kind of thing I tried to raise unsuccessfully in the NYLS pervert professor thread. Distinguishing the moral terpitude of being anywhere IN the production chain of child porn vs. "only" the moral terpitude involved in looking at it...but everybody took that as "support" for the guy and insensitivity toward the victims. The issues that would have been discussed in an Ethics class would have pin-pointed what behavior had a "causality" relationship to other incidents of those horrendous crimes and what behaviors were outside the chain of future causality, yada yada. I'm not looking to raise the issue again at ALL (or I'd have kept responding to that thread)...but since we're talking about philosophy courses, that's exactly the (only) direction I was headed with that thread in the first place.

As far as philosoPHERS, my three favorites are Bertrand Russell (See The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell ) and Albert Einstein, who contributed much more to human thought than E=mc2 (see Ideas and Opinions, Out of My Later Years, The Human Side), and Richard Feynman, the (late) Cal-Tech physicist who did the O-Ring/ice water demonstration at a news conference in 1986 to illustrate what happened with Challenger (see The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, What Do You Care What They Think, The Meaning of It All ).

As far as Metaphysicians and Ethicists go, my favorites are also both professors I had, and to the best of my knowledge neither has ever been accused of any sex crimes. Robert Taylor (see Metaphysics , and Freedom, Anarchy and The Law ), and Robert Baker (see Medical Ethics .

quote:

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The biggest trick in philosphy is learning how to present your arguments

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I agree that's important, but I consider that to be the biggest trick in advocacy...to me the biggest issue in philosophy is separating and isolating individual logical issues and point-specific relevancy.

[ 06-28-2003, 04:52 AM: Message edited by: ProWritingServices4LEOs ]

[RebeccaCDT]

Overall, a philosophy course can help you develop good thinking habits. It will teach you to try and look at things from several perspectives before settling on the conclusion you intuitively feel is most correct.

(except in situations that require immediate action, then follow your instinct without question, you can philosophize later)

The biggest help I got from it was being able to identify skewed logic, almost immediately, and having acquainted myself briefly with the perspective one uses to arrive at erroneous conclusions, I am better able to avoid the distorted logic, and better able to hold my ground in a discussion involving a complete idiot.

I think all it really is - is super in depth rationalizing.