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Philosophy 1765: Requirements

Table of Contents

Course Structure

The course will meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 1pm, in Corliss-Brackett 106. We will generally discuss a different paper each meeting, and each student is required to post a "response" to the reading to the course forum by no later than 10am the day we will be discussing it. (This is to give everyone, and especially me, time to read and digest your responses.)

Course meetings will primarily consist of discussion, though I will lecture when that seems advisable. Students are not specifically required but are encouraged to read each other's postings, to comment upon them, and generally to use the course forum as a platform for discussing the readings and asking questions.

Class periods marked as `Discussion' are an opportunity for us to try to synthesize some of what we've been studying. You should plan to review the papers we've read since the previous Discussion session and write some thoughts, as usual, to the course forum.

Prerequisites

Contemporary analytic philosophy began with certain discoveries in formal logic, and much of the work we shall be reading is informed in one way or another by logic: Arguments, premises, and conclusions are often stated using the concepts of formal logic. A working understanding of basic logic, such as one would acquire in Phil 0540, is therefore essential.

Prior exposure to philosophy is also essential: Much of the material we will be reading is difficult. As usual with 1000-level courses, then, at least one prior course in philosophy is required, and two are really preferred.

Readings

The papers we will be reading are generally quite difficult. You should expect to read each paper at least twice in order to understand it. The first time you read a paper, I'd suggest you just read through it, and don't worry too much if you're not getting everything. At this point, you're just trying to get a general sense for what the author is trying to do. The second time you read the paper, you should slow down. This is when you really do want to pause and think carefully through the various arguments that the author is giving. You will find extended reading notes to help you on the syllabus. If you have questions about the reading, you should feel free to post those to the course forum. (Start a new topic, if that seems appropriate.)

There is one required text for the course: Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, which should be available at the Brown Bookstore.

Other readings will be distributed electronically. Many of these are available online, through Brown's digital journal holdings; others will be scans of articles, or chapters from books, that are not otherwise available digitally. Students will be able to download these from the course website.

The files are usually available in two forms. There are (i) a DjVu file and (ii) a PDF file. Why both forms? They have different virtues.

• If you want to print the article out, then you should download the DjVu file. These files have two printed pages per viewed page, just as if you were looking at a photocopy of the article or book, and they are therefore easiest to print and read. But note: When printing these files, make sure you print them in the correct mode, namely 'landscape'. You will get very small text and a lot of blank paper if you print them 'portrait'.
• If you are going to read the article on your computer, or on an e-book reader, then you should perhaps download the PDF file. These are one printed page per scanned page, and where possible they have been optimized for on-screen reading. Then again, many ebook readers will split two pages into one automatically, so you may find that the DjVu still works better.

There is another advantage to DjVu. It is a file format specifically designed for scanned text, so when we're dealing with page scans (as we often are with older articles), the DjVu encoder produces files that are typically much smaller than the corresponding PDFs, sometimes dramatically smaller.

To view the PDFs, you will of course need a PDF reader. For the DjVu files, you will need a DjVu reader. Free browser plugins for Windows and Mac OSX are available from Caminova; Linux users can likely just install the djviewlibre package using their distro's package management system. Another option is Okular, which was originally written for Linux's KDE Desktop Environment but which can now be run, experimentally, on Windows and OSX, as well. A list of other DjVu resources is maintained at djvu.org. There are also DjVu readers available for Android and iOS. Go to Play Store or whatever to find them.

The program I've used to convert PDFs to DjVu is a simple Bash script I wrote myself, pdf2djvu. It relies upon other programs to do the real work and should run on OSX as well as on Linux.

Requirements and Grading Policies

Grades for the course will be determined as follows.

• Reading Responses and Participation: 30%
  For each assigned reading, students are required to post, on the course forum, a response to that reading no later than 10am the day we will be discussing it. I encourage all of us to read and, if we have something to say, comment upon, the submissions of the others.
  The responses on the course forum will be graded on a scale of 0-5 points. The main criterion is the amount of thought that emerges in the response. A 3 should be considered average. A 4 means the reply shows a deeper understanding than would necessarily be expected, and a 5 will be given only for exceptionally good responses. A 2 means there is some inadequacy in one's understanding of the reading, and a 1 signals a serious misunderstanding that should probably be corrected, or else just a lack of genuine effort.
  The participation part of the grade will take into account in-class participation but also engagement with me and other students on the course forum.
• Short Papers: 40%
  There will be two short papers of about 4-5 pages, with a maximum length of 1500 words. Lists of topics will be distributed on 10 February and 17 March; the papers will be due on 17 February and 24 March. They will be returned, with comments, on 27 February and 3 April. A revised version of the paper will then be due a week later: 6 March and 12 April.
  Separate grades will be given for the initial version of the paper and for the revised version. The grade for the revised version will reflect the extent to which the student has made use of the feedback provided to improve the paper.
• Final Paper: 30%
  The final requirement for the course is a shortish term paper, which will be due by 5pm on the last day of reading period, 9 May. The paper should be a maximum of 4500 words (roughly 15 pages), but can be as short as 3000 words (roughly 9 pages). The paper should in the style of a submission to the journal Thought, of which I am one of the Associate Editors. Articles published in Thought are brief, direct discussions of tightly specified issues. Students should look at a few of these papers to get a sense for their style.
  The topic of the paper is up to the student but must relate directly to at least two of the papers we have read. It must be cleared with the instructor no later than 28 April. Doing so means sending the instructor an email containing a paragraph or so that explains the proposed topic.

Grades will be recorded on the course's Canvas site (which will really be used only for that purpose). Pay no attention to Canvas's report of your cumulative grade. This is useless.

The short papers are due at the beginning of class on the day specified. I will not accept late papers. On the other hand, you will find that I am quite prepared to grant extensions, so long as they are requested in advance, that is, at least one day prior to the due-date. Extensions will not be granted after that time except in very unusual and unfortunate circumstancess.

Because I am so reasonable, exploitation of my reasonableness will be taken badly.

Time Expectations

• In class time: We expect to have about 35 meetings, so you will spend about 35 hours in class.
• You should expect to spend about 3 hours per class reviewing material from the previous class, reading the material for that class, and writing your response on the course forum. This accounts for 105 hours.
• For each of the two short papers: 8 hours on the initial draft; 4 hours on the revised draft. This accounts for 24 hours.
• Final paper: 4 hours reviewing material, formulating a topic, and drafting a paper proposal; 12 hours spent writing the paper. This accounts for 16 hours.

You should thus expect your total time commitment for this class to be about 180 hours.

In Class Behavior

Students may use laptops and the like to take notes in class or to access material we are discussing in class, but all other use of computers, tablets, and mobile devices is prohibited during class. This includes but is not limited to checking email, texting, and searching the web, even if the search is related to the course. I establish this rule not for my benefit, not even for yours, but rather for that of your peers.

In a study entitled "Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers", Faria Sana, Tina Weston, and Nichola Cepeda showed eactly that. It is not just that students who "multi-task" during class—check e-mail, text, or whatever—received significantly lower grades in the study than students who did not. This is not surprising, since the human brain simply cannot focus on very many things at one time. (If you're skeptical about this, then watch this video or perhaps some of these ones.)

Rather, the surprising conclusion was that students who were sitting near other students who were "multi-tasking" also received significantly lower grades than students were who not. In fact, they were almost as distracted as the students who were actually doing the multi-tasking. There is thus evidence that "multi-tasking" does not only hurt the person doing it. It also harms the people around them. And that is the basis of my request that students not engage in such activities during class. If someone near you is doing so, you should feel free to ask them to stop.

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Richard Heck Department of Philosophy Brown University