I plan to have this page posted here while I work on the syllabus. Once I have the syllabus posted on this web site (http://web.ku.edu/~utile/courses/tutorial1), I will probably delete this page.
The purpose of this course, as stated in KU’s graduate catalog, is to provide “[i]ntensive supervised training in the techniques of research.” My main priorities will be to develop your ability to write about philosophical issues and texts. This activity obviously requires, in normal practice, the ability to read and analyze philosophical texts, so we will work on that a lot, too.
This course is open only to first-year graduate students in Philosophy, and is required of all of them. If you are such a student, use enrollment code 62045 to sign up for this course.
The course will meet weekly, on Friday afternoons from 3 to 4:50, and I’ll also periodically meet with each student individually.
There won’t be any books you’ll have to buy for this course, and I won’t ask the bookstore to order any.
The course will have two parts. The first part of the course (January 23–April 3, leaving January 16 for introductory matters) will consist of five units of two weeks each, each unit concerning some important philosophical issue and including readings that take opposing (or at least contrary) points of view on that issue. Following are the issues we will cover and the primary readings for each of them. Although the readings collectively have a bit of an ethics slant, I’ve tried to choose issues varied enough for students with widely different interests to all feel more or less equally at home in this course.
The readings listed below are not all of the readings that will be required. But all of them are among the readings that will be required, and indeed these will be the primary readings of the course. So, you can read any of these items in advance with the assurance that doing so will probably make things easier for you later. A few of these items are already available electronically through the web site of the KU Libraries. I hope to have all of these items available electronically (in the form of PDF files that I can e-mail to you) by December 1. But if you want any of them in particular prior to December 1, let me know, and I'll gladly try to e-mail it to you within a few days of your request.
The assignments for this part of the course will include both summary/expository papers and argumentative papers. I will probably require you to write a very short summary paper (of, say, not more than 1,000 words) for every unit (or some part of every unit) and a pretty short, narrowly focused argumentative paper (of, say, not more than 1,500 words) for three out of the five units. I expect that for each unit, the first class period will be devoted to improving your understanding of the readings (in the service of which we may go over perhaps two of the summary papers written for that unit), with the second class period being devoted to closely examining three of the argumentative papers written for that unit. I plan to give you some choice regarding which units you write argumentative papers for, though we’ll need some balance for scheduling reasons.
The primary readings for this unit will be a widely anthologized journal article by Don Marquis and part of a book by David Boonin:
The primary readings for this unit will be from Mattias Steup and Ernest Sosa’s collection Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (Blackwell Publishing, 2005):
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article offering a broader overview of this issue: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/closure-epistemic. (This article may or may not end up being required reading.)
The primary readings for this unit will be some material from a book co-authored by Bernard Williams and two journal articles published in response:
The primary readings for this unit will be from Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman’s collection Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (Blackwell Publishing, 2008):
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article offering a broader overview of this issue: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal. (This article may or may not end up being required reading.)
One article we’ll definitely read is the one through which Nozick introduced this problem into the philosophical literature:
A brief introduction to Newcomb’s problem can be found in a 2002 article in Slate: http://www.slate.com/?id=2061419.
The second part of the course (April 10–May 1) will consist of four class meetings over the course of which each student will submit a 3,000-word paper for critique by the class. (Two class meetings will be devoted to two papers each, and two will be devoted to three papers each, for a total of ten papers over four weeks.) The topic of your paper does not have to be the topic of one of the five units of the course—you can choose your own topic, within certain bounds.
During this part of the course, your grade will be influenced not only by the quality of your own 3,000-word paper, but also by the quality of your comments (which might in some cases be required to be in writing) on the paper(s) or one or more other student(s).
The purpose of this part of the course is to enable you to work, with the benefit of peer and instructor critique, on a topic of your own choosing, so that you can progress towards having a 3,000-word paper that is suitable for conference presentation and perhaps eventually, most likely in expanded form, publication.