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  • Tag: mini-syllabus

    • Mini-Syllabus: Introduction to Introductory Philosophy

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on May 11, 2016

      Every so often I put together what I call a “mini-syllabus”; roughly, I pull together several books that speak to a common theme that I think would be either fun or instructive to read together. Sometimes the lists are highly academic and focused, and sometimes the starting text is more of a springboard for further exploration, but they’re never as broad and diverse as traditional syllabi. Today, I’m going to break that trend with a miniature syllabus on my favorite topic: philosophy.

      However, this won’t be a full introduction to the subject, but rather an introduction to some of my favorite introductory texts, meaning that this list won’t get into the nitty-gritty details of epistemological, political, metaphysical, aesthetic, ethical, or critical questions that make up the discipline, but instead will acquaint you with a variety of welcoming overtures to the field. Rather than diving into bell hooks’ incredible work on race and gender, or Russell’s clarifying take on the philosophy of language, you will instead get to see how they approach approaching the work they do, and how they invite others to join in the conversation.

      My reason for building this list is because, in a lot of ways, this really is the heart of philosophy. The work that philosophers do – answering questions, analyzing possibilities, critiquing assumptions, and more – comes from a core desire that transcends the specifics of any given sub-field. There is, in all specializations of philosophy, a deep and abiding commitment to continue seeking truth and digging for new problems to solve, even when the topic seems to be settled. I’ve written my own exhortations to philosophical inquiry here, here, and here.

      —–

      Without further ado, I give you my list of favorite invitations to philosophy:

      1. bell hooks’ essay on “Critical Thinking“, from the third book in her series on teaching, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom: This is chapter one of hooks’ third book on the topic, and in it she uncovers the main goal – and primary challenge – of every educator I’ve ever met: guiding students to be self-motivated, critical learners and generators of knowledge. While her focus in this essay is on the classroom, the same lessons can be applied to the independent scholar encountering philosophical arguments on their own time. Rather than simply reading to be instructed, everyone can read critically, and everyone can treat that reading experience as a conversation.

      2. Richard Feynman’s commencement speech at CalTech in 1974, “Cargo Cult Science“: This speech takes the same theme as bell hooks’ essay, but looks outside the classroom to see where so many of our barriers to critical thinking come from. While his main focus is eliminating barriers to honest and authentic science, his advice is applicable to any form of intellectual inquiry; it is just as easy to be duped by prose rationalization as it is the manipulation of scientific studies. Just because an argument sounds reasonable does not mean that it is.

      3. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic: While the entire text is rich and wonderful, the famous allegory is famous for a reason – it frames philosophy as a process guided by an elusive truth, along a difficult path that will force you question everything you hold certain, after which you may never view the world the same way again. The allegory functions very differently in context of the whole work, but as a stand alone piece, it’s still very effective.

      4. Thomas Aquinas’ Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate Book 11: The Teacher, especially Article I: Can a man or only God teach and be called teacher?: In this text, Aquinas speaks of both self-guided and traditionally instructed learning as an activity of discovery, rather than as the passive reception of knowledge. In essence, we can acquire knowledge by means of discovery (guided by our own natural reason), or by means of following the discoveries of another. This means that a good teacher will not simply tell you what you need to know, but guide you by demonstrating how they discovered it (which is often much speedier, allowing our community knowledge base to grow and benefit from new discoveries). This is very dry reading (sorry Thomas), but the ideas are exciting. If you are not religious, many of the ideas presented here can be applied to an understanding of truth as natural, rather than super natural (though perhaps not the article about angels).

      5. Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins” from the collection Labrynths: A play on the theories of idealism and surrealism, this story begins to complicate the task of philosophy, identity, and teaching in a way that is also entertaining and engaging. It will make you want to explore idealism, existentialism, and more.

      6. Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, especially chapter I “Appearance and Reality” and chapter XV “The Value of Philosophy”: This is Russell’s introductory text, written for brand new students of philosophy. In it, he writes about the difficulties of giving simple answers to what seem like simple questions, and also situates the role of philosophy among other disciplines. For more of my thoughts on these two chapters, see my Philosopher Fridays entry on Russell.

      7. Maria Lugones’ “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception“, published in 1987 (published online in 2009) in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy: This essay reads to me as a simultaneous extension of and challenge to Russell’s call to “enlargen ourselves” so that we can see things objectively. Lugones explores what makes that so difficult, and describes an alternative that allows us the philosophical benefits Russell seeks while also honoring the reality of life in the complicated context of identity. Her approach includes personal narrative, and then builds through the essay into a view of philosophy as an act of imaginative play that speaks much more practically to the way we can apply the critical thinking skills encouraged in the readings above in our daily experience.

      8. Nils Ch. Rauhut’s Ultimate Questions: Thinking about Philosophy: In philosophy, it is often difficult to find an introductory textbook that works for anyone but the scholar who wrote it (there are so many ways to approach the topic), but this one is excellent. While it does at times oversimplify complex topics, it does so in a way that invites the kinds of conversations hooks and Feynman in particular encourage above. I have a couple of minor quibbles with the presentation of some ideas (for example, including Descartes in the section on skepticism based on Meditation 1 is understandable, but perhaps a bit misleading for those who do not continue to read his resolution in Meditations 2-6 into rationalism), but overall it’s a textbook I highly recommend for anyone interested in learning the vocabulary and range of philosophical inquiry.

      9. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, especially Chapter 1: No work more comprehensively lays out the history of philosophical development with such instructive generality; instead of looking in a detailed way at different philosophers, or different philosophical fields, Arendt captures the conversations between competing ideologies, and the effect of that conversation on philosophy, religion, science, literature, economics, and politics in a way that is both descriptive and itself philosophical. Her aim in this text is to shift the conversation of philosophy away from a focus on the quiet eternity of contemplative death to the noisy, complicated, needy, mortal world of the living.

      —–

      I was going for an even ten items, but I think that should be quite enough to get anyone started – actually, any one of them could easily send a reader off on a path of intellectual discovery. If you do read something here and would like recommendations of where to go next, or have suggestions for other great introductory texts, please don’t hesitate to comment.

      5/12 Correction: Lugones’ article was printed in Hypatia in 1987, and was then published online in 2009. 

      Posted in Series | 6 Comments | Tagged academia, aquinas, arendt, bell hooks, borges, feynman, learning, lugones, mini-syllabus, philosophy, Plato, reading, russell, teaching
    • Mini-Syllabus: Saint Brendan, the Spiritual Navigator

      Posted at 3:02 am by Michelle Joelle, on February 3, 2016

      For my latest Mini-Syllabus, I begin with the legend of Saint Brendan the Navigator. Saint Brendan was an Irish Bishop who, upon hearing of the Isle of the Blessed, a phantom paradise set somewhere in the Atlantic, sets out with a band of monks in a hand-made boat to sail from isle to isle until he finds what he seeks. Passed by both oral and written means for many years, the earliest existing version of the story comes to us in Latin as the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, written around 900AD, and is discussed by scholars as a religious allegory, a possible early discovery of North America, and as the descendent of the seven Medieval Irish immrama and the echtra “The Voyage of Bran” (all worth exploring in their own right).

      It’s a fascinating tale of religious pilgrimage and fantastic creatures, and stands as a showpiece of medieval folk mythology. For this mini-syllabus, I’ve decided for this syllabus to take Saint Brendan as a starting point for a broader exploration of sea-faring spiritual journeys.

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      Part 1: The Starting Point, Saint Brendan himself

      1. The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, translated by Gerard McNamara from the original Latin text, this edition aims to present the tale in verse while staying as close to the original as possible. The result is an incredibly spare epic. Some of the most exciting scenes – the kind you could imagine stretching into whole films just by themselves – take up only one or two stanzas. It can also, on occasion, be a bit hard to follow, but I don’t mind lingering over passages.

      One of the things I love about medieval poetry is how much is left to the imagination. While modern novels tell you exactly what the characters are thinking and feeling, older tales tend to relate plot points as though they were a speaker’s notes, leaving the details up to individual storytellers (and modern readers) to fill in with their own voice.

      2. Saint Brendan the Navigator, by Moran Llywelyn, is a highly fictionalized prose account based on the original tale. If you prefer modern retellings of ancient and medieval works to verse renditions, this looks like the way to go. I haven’t read this yet, but that’s just exactly what these syllabi are for.

      3. Tim Severin’s The Brendan Voyage is a non-fiction exploration of the feasibility of Saint Brednan’s voyage. Part historical analysis, part adventure tale, part sea-faring storytelling, this is a bonafide classic.

      Part 2: Other Tales of Seafaring Self-Discovery and Personal Transformation

      Here, I have chosen three well-loved, well known tales of travel and self-discovery. They speak for themselves, so I have left them without explanation.

      4. The Odyssey, by Homer

      5. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis

      6. A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin

      Part 3: To Walk on Dry Land

      If you are interested in tales of religious journey and transformation that leave the sea behind (for the most part), you may wish to embark with two other saints:

      7. Confessions, by Saint Augustine, take a more literal approach to the spiritual journey, but like Saint Brendan and his fellows, Augustine’s travels are filled with pitfalls, backsliding, strife, loss, faith, metaphor, reflection, and spiritual growth. I’ve here linked to Chadwick’s beautiful translation, but I have recently acquired Garry Wills’ version, and am looking forward to reading it soon. Wills’ translation of De Magistro is my go-to for that text, so I have high hopes.

      8. The Confession of Saint Patrick is brief but poignant, drawing heavily from the Bible. This 5th century work predates Navigatio Sancti Brendani, and so in addition to exemplifying the general theme of the syllabus, it sets the foundation for the Irish brand of Christianity that led to Saint Brendan’s voyage.

      ____________________________________

      I had fun picking and choosing my favorites from a very rich tradition of sea-faring epics. It seems that rambling voyages and spiritual journeys go hand in hand. If I’ve missed your favorite, please let me know in the comments – I’m always looking for something new to read, and I particularly love stories of ships and adventures.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 16 Comments | Tagged books, mini-syllabus, Navigatio Sancti Brendani, reading list, spiritual journey
    • Mini-Syllabus: Turn of the Century Girlhood in Anglo-American Society

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on May 14, 2015

      A little while ago I came down with a cold and ended up binging on Netflix for a couple of days, watching the entire series of The Paradise, and then following it up with A Room with a View. While both are billed as love stories, I think what I found most interesting about them was their completely unselfconscious treatments of femininity within the very self-aware political landscape the pre-suffrage Edwardian era. It was a time of transition: not yet progressive, but not complacent either.

      Though the stories were set at around the turn of the century and the heart of the “first wave” of feminism, the films were, of course, made by modern minds. My curiosity piqued, I decided to revisit some childhood books that took up the same theme and were written within the time period to see how femininity was treated by its contemporary authors. I decided to give myself some parameters to keep the focus tight; I wanted books that were written around the transitional mood of the turn of the century, focused mainly on girlhood (rather than adulthood), and took up the perspective of E.M. Forster’s England and its colonial off-shoots. The result is a miniature syllabus on how Western culture viewed femininity and, more specifically, girlhood, during the early stages of the feminist movement.

      ______________________________________________________

      Part One: Fiction at the Turn of the Century

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      1) A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster – 1908: Since the movie adaptation of this novel inspired this quest, it seems appropriate to start with the novel itself. Set in both England and Italy, this story is about a young girl starching against the rules of society. This is such a great depiction of the Edwardian era in general; coming on the heels of the Victorian era, the Edwardians were the last great swell of the English aristocracy before it began its slow decline, and in this novel you can almost feel the characters coming to a boil.

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      2) A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett – 1905: This novel is about a little girl who grows up wealthy, but when her father dies is thrown into poverty. This gives us a view not just of the feminine ideal of the Edwardian period, but shows how that ideal was expected to hold up even under the harshest conditions.

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      3) The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett – 1911: One of my favorite books of all time, this book is an obvious follow up to A Little Princess. Though the story is generally cast as exploration of the joys and powers of nature, femininity is often characterized by interiority (the domestic space), the wildness of nature (nurturing, childbirth, etc.), and mystery (“women’s intuition” and the like). An unkempt, secret, interior garden is such an interesting image through which to cast a young girl’s growth and change over the course of the story.

      Part Two: On the Periphery

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      4) Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery – 1908: This story jumps us over the pond to Prince Edward Island and into a very different world. PEI was at this time about 40 years removed from British rule, and is in a unique position to tackle the notion of girlhood head on. Anne is notable both for simply being a girl (when the family had specifically requested a boy to work as a farmhand), and for being unusual for a girl – she’s loud and talkative, boisterous and bold.

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      5) Little Women, by Lousia May Alcott – 1868/1869: Because this story was written and set in the Civil War era of the United States, it shows us a different perspective. Little Women deals with girlhood directly, with each sister offering a different layer of compliance or resistance with the norms of the time.

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      6) Little House Books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder – 1932-1943: Although this series is set in the late 19th century American Mid-West, it is written in the voice of the post-suffrage 1930s. Laura Ingall’s hard life of homesteading serves as both a memory of the past and a foil for Depression in the Dust Bowl, effectively bookending feminism’s “first wave”.

      Part Three: Non-Fiction Historical Accounts

      If you’re looking for some broader historical background, these texts are all excellent places to start. The titles are all quite self-explanatory, so you can choose based on your own level of interest. I’ve kept the focus here to the 19th century, with the idea that it sets the stage for the turn of the century attitudes.

      7) Gender Roles in the 19th Century, by Kathryn Hughes

      8) Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden, by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

      9) Femininity to Feminism: Women and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Twayne’s Women and Literature Series) by Susan Rubinow Gorsky

      10) Frontiers of Femininity: A New Historical Geography of the Ninteenth-Century American West (Space, Place, and Society) by Karen M. Professor Morin

      ______________________________________________________

      I know that there is quite a bit missing here, but I wanted to keep the focus as tightly around E.M. Forster’s world as possible. I left out the teens and the 20s, suffrage, anything overtly political, and most notably, non-white perspectives. I have plans for future iterations of this syllabus that will deal with girlhood in other groups, cultures, and time-periods, so if you have any suggestions to add to this list, or for future lists, please feel free to leave links in the comments. As always, be sure to describe your suggestions, as links alone will likely be filtered out as spam by the powers of WordPress.

      Posted in Series | 5 Comments | Tagged books, Edwardian Era, femininity, feminism, girlhood, history, mini-syllabus, reading
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