Philosophy 202 (Fall 2023)

Readings in the Western Philosophical Tradition: Modern Philosophy

Professor Patrick Frierson (call me “Patrick”)

My email: frierspr@whitman.edu

Class Meets in Olin 129, Tuesday and Thursday 1-2:20

Come see me!

I’m in my office (Olin East 193) and happy to meet with students on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9-10:30 am. We can talk about questions related to class, but you don’t need a specific reason to come. If you can’t make these times, send me an email and we can make an appointment for another time. I’m also happy to meet with students over zoom who prefer to meet in that format. I will generally hang out in zoom office hours Monday evenings from 9-10 PM at https://whitman.zoom.us/j/92189368747, but if you want to be sure I’m going to be there, shoot me an email before dropping in.

Course Overview: We will start the semester with Descartes’s Meditations, a text that for the past couple of hundred years has been considered a (and some would even say “the”) canonical text in philosophy. After our initial reading of Descartes, we will study the philosophers of this period thematically, focusing on three philosophical themes. Those themes will be chosen by you (with help from our textbook editors and from me). Over the course of the semester, you’ll read and discuss lots of great philosophy, work in a small group to organize the thematic unit you choose, write three papers, give two presentations, and (if you choose) take an optional final exam.

Accommodations: If you are a student who will need accommodations in this course, please meet with Antonia Keithahn, Assistant Director of Academic Resources: Disability Support (Memorial 326, 509.527.5767, keithaam@whitman.edu) for assistance in developing a plan to address your academic needs. All information about disabilities is considered private; if I receive notification from Ms. Keithahn that you are eligible to receive an accommodation, I will provide it in as discreet a manner as possible. Moreover, all students should be aware that the Academic Resource Center provides free peer tutoring for many 100 and 200 level courses.  All tutors are students who have already completed the course, earned a B+ or better, and were recommended by their instructor.  If you feel you would benefit from utilizing this service, please visit the ARC webpage and submit a request.  You can also locate a schedule for drop in tutoring on the ARC website. Likewise, in accordance with the College’s Religious Accommodations Policy, I will provide reasonable accommodations for students who have conflicts with scheduled exams, assignments, or required attendance in class because of religious observances. Please review the course schedule at the beginning of the semester to determine any such potential conflicts and give me written notice (email is acceptable) by the end of the second week of class about your need for religious accommodations. If you believe that I have failed to abide by these policies, you may contact my department chair Michelle Jenkins or file a grievance in accordance with Whitman’s Grievance Policy.

Computers, Internet, and Academic Honesty: Unless students have specific accommodations that require the use of computers in class, and except when students use computers for presentations to the class as a whole, our classroom will be screen-free. I expect you to put away cell phones and laptops when you enter the room and to keep them away until you leave the room. In addition, with the exception of preparing for presentations on your philosophers, I very strongly encourage you to avoid using the internet as a crutch for understanding the texts we are reading. These are difficult texts, and it will be tempting to just see what other people say that they say. Instead, take the time to engage with them on your own and develop your own interpretation of them. Finally, I expect all the work you do in this class to be your own. You are free (and in fact encouraged) to talk to one another about the material, but you should only turn in what you have written yourself. If you do consult with any outside sources (including classmates, friends, websites, books in Penrose, or your talking owl), you must explicitly list those sources in a “works consulted” section of your paper or presentation, and whenever you quote or paraphrase from a source, you should specifically cite that source where you quote or paraphrase from it.

Required Text:

Lisa Shapiro and Marcy Lascano, eds. Early Modern Philosophy: An Anthology, Broadview Press: 2022.

Goals: If you put forth effort in this course, by the end of the semester you should:

· have a basic understanding of Descartes’s Meditations and his philosophy as a whole

· be familiar with ideas of a wide range of modern European philosophers on a variety of topics

· be able to read historical philosophers and use their ideas to stimulate your own philosophical insights

· have tools to engage with difference and diversity, even when you find it disorienting, disruptive to your preconceived ideas, and hard to understand

· be able to explain your ideas both orally and in writing

· be able to work as part of a team to develop materials worth sharing with others

This course is an opportunity to learn and improve, not primarily an opportunity to show how good you already are.

Assignments

Reading, Preparation, and Participation in Class: I expect you to come to class prepared, having read all of the material for the day, identified the key sentences in which the most important points are made and defended, worked through the central arguments of those sections, and prepared specific questions that you hope will be addressed in class. Because the goals for this class include learning how to read challenging texts and engage with diversity, I want you to struggle with these texts on your own. For that reason, you should not consult the internet for help with any of the primary sources we read in this class, with the exception of those about which you give a presentation or help design a class module.

For the Descartes readings, you should complete the reading guide; though I will not collect this or grade it, I may ask you to share your answer to questions in the guide. For other readings, you should continue the same close reading that that guide facilitated.

You are expected to participate in class discussion in ways that are meaningful, respectful, and balance courage with humility.

Preparation and participation will not count for any specific portion of your grade, but I will adjust final grades based on the quality of your contributions to our class discussions. Participation does not count for any particular percentage of your class grade, but based on participation, I may alter your final grade upwards by as much as ½ letter grade (e.g. from B to B+) and downwards by as much as a full grade point (e.g. from B+ to C+).

Turning in your work: For all written work that you do not do in class, you should email your work to me at frierspr@whitman.edu. Please turn in all work in .doc or .docx format. Save your file with your full name in the filename, along with some indication of the assignment. Please do not send googledocs. If you work on googledocs, download it as a .doc file and email it in that form to me.

Papers. Over the course of the semester, you will write two papers.

1. Everyone must write a paper on Descartes (due 5 PM on Friday, September 22^nd, 10% of final course grade)

2. Everyone may write a paper on a philosophical topic different from the theme that you lead for the class as a whole. This can be a topic related to another group’s theme, or any other philosophical topic that you choose. (These papers will be written in stages over the course of the semester. Each component of the paper must be turned in on time, and the first complete draft will be due on November 15^th, with the final revision due on the last day of class. The paper will be worth up to 20% of your final course grade, replacing other work on which you did less well.)

For more on each of this papers, click the relevant links. Note, too, the “turning in your work” submission guidelines. I will give your papers a “score” based on my grading criteria, available here. (If you prefer a letter grade, simply ask.) Any paper is revisable until the last day of class, and your grade will be the average of your initial grade and your final revision.

Thematic Unit Leadership. By the third day of classes, you will be assigned to a group that will, together, develop a module for the class to explore a philosophical theme through a set of readings by historical philosophers. Each module will consist of 5 class sessions during which the entire class will do primary source readings from at least 3 different philosophers, and together with those philosophers, we will address important questions surrounding a philosophical theme. Your group will probably have 6-7 people in it, and you will need to work together to plan for and organize the classes. I have reserved our class period on September 15^th for you to work on your plan together as a group and to ask me questions as a group about the plans. I will devote at least 20 minutes to each group during that class period. In addition, I encourage you to meet with me during office hours (see my office hours above).

As part of exercising leadership over a unit of the course, you and your group will do the following:

1. Submit a Philosophical Theme Plan, no later than 1PM on September 18^th (with Part One of the plan due September 11^th.) See the hyperlink for details about what should go into this plan.

2. Submit Philosopher’s Briefs for each philosopher associated with that theme, identifying (a) the relevant readings from the philosopher, (b) the main questions they discuss related to the theme, and (c) at least two important arguments they make related to the theme. You should end each brief with a short explanation of why you are or are not assigning readings from this philosopher to the class. (These briefs will be submitted by the team member or members responsible for those philosophers. Each philosopher should have one brief and will get one score.) Each student in the class must submit at least one Philosopher’s Brief by September 6^th, and all Briefs are due along with your Philosophical Theme Plan, no later than 1 PM on September 18^th. Students who complete more than one brief will be graded with a weighted average of their brief scores (with the better score counting for twice as much as the others).

3. Give a short opening presentation to the class laying out the theme.

4. Give a short presentation on each major philosopher from whom we do primary source readings. (This should be as short as possible.) Each student must participate in at least one presentation (either on a philosopher or laying out the theme). Students who complete more than one presentation will be graded with a weighted average of their presentation scores (with the better score counting for twice as much as the others).

5. Prepare discussion questions and/or exercises for each day of class. You will be responsible for getting our discussion started, but you will not need to “lead” discussion for the day. You should plan to use 20-30 minutes of class time for your presentation and discussion questions. I encourage those involved in getting discussion questions ready to meet with me during my office hours before the class that you lead. If you have an idea for class that will require an entire class period, please let me know that ahead of time.

6. Submit a Group Assessment within 7 days of the last day that your group is leading class on the theme. Every student needs to write their own Group Assessment. You cannot pass the group assignment without submitting a group assessment. (While no set percentage of your grade is based on how you are assessed by your peers, I may modify students’ individual grades considerably based on group assessments.)

7. Be creative! Think of things that have worked well in discussions in other classes. Bring in material that can help make the texts more engaging for your classmates. And so on. This is your chance to make this class your own.

The philosophical theme plan should be submitted by the group as a whole. The group assessment should be submitted by each individual member of the group. The presentations and discussion-leading can be done by any subset of the leadership group.

Celebrations of Learning. At the end of each thematic unit, you will have a short celebration of knowledge (aka a “quiz” or “exam”). The specific format of this celebration will be determined by the students who are leading that thematic unity. It can be open- or closed-book, in class (on the last day of the unit) or take-home, timed or untimed, etc. You will know the format of the exam on the first (or at the latest, the second) day of the unit.

Presentations. You will give a presentation as part of your thematic unit leadership. In addition, during the last two weeks of the semester (after Thanksgiving), each of you will give a short presentation (8-12 minutes) on a modern “European” philosopher other than Descartes. The presentation should clearly and concisely lay out what is most important about the philosopher you discuss, including not only the positions they hold but the most important arguments they offer for those positions. You should very briefly discuss the life of the philosopher and something about their influences and impact. The primary purpose of the presentation should be to convince your classmates and me that this philosopher either should or should not be included in future courses on modern European philosophy at Whitman. You may use powerpoint or other supplementary media, but you do not have to.

Final Exam. There will be a closed book, blue book final exam for this course during the regular final exam period. Students may consult a single page of notes to the exam. The Final Exam will have three parts. Part One will consist of quotation identification and analysis, where you will be given four short quotations and asked to identify the authors of two of them, explain your answer to each, and briefly state the relation of each quotation to the rest of the author’s work. Part Two will have four essay questions which will relate to the themes and figures we covered this semester. You will be expected to answer two of those questions. Part Three will consist of a single question: “Which philosopher should definitely be included in this course next year? Why? (If your answer is not Descartes, be sure to explain why the philosopher you chose is more important to include than Descartes. If your answer is Descartes, be sure to show why he is more important than at least three other very important philosophers.”

Your final grade will be broken down as follows: Descartes Paper (10%); Thematic Unit Leadership (30%, divided evenly between your overall group grade, your presentation grade, and your philosopher’s briefs grade); Canon Expansion Presentation (15%); Thematic Unit Celebrations of Learning (15%); Final Exam (30%). In addition, there is an optional Philosophical Topic Paper, which can be worth up to 20% of your final grade, taking the place of other areas where you did not do as well.

Course Timeline

	Reading to complete before class	Assignments to complete before class	What to expect in class / Presenters
Aug 30	Descartes, Meditation 1 (pp. 97b-100a)	Get yourself excited for the semester!	-- Cartesian meditation -- Cartesian skepticism -- Discussion of the syllabus and course -- Overview of “Modern Philosophy” -- Preliminary Group meetings (by theme)
Sept. 4	Descartes, Discourse on the Method, Parts 1-2 and Meditations 1-2 (pp. 87-104a)	Get started on the Descartes Reading Guide (You should finish the rereading section before we cover the material in class.)	-- Cartesian skepticism continued -- Existence of self -- Nature of self -- Finalize Theme Groups
Sept. 6	Meditations 2-4 (100-116a) Get started on your philosophical theme readings	Descartes Reading Guide Before class, you need to read at least one of the philosophers you’ll read for your theme, and send me a draft of your Philosopher’s Brief (see above) on that philosopher.	-- Argument(s) for the existence of God -- Significance of God’s existence -- Reassessing skeptical doubts -- Organizing into groups based on themes
Sept. 11	Meditations 5-6 (116b-127)	Descartes Reading Guide Submit Part One of your Philosophical Theme Plan.	-- Proof for the existence of an external world -- Relationship between mind and body -- Status of skeptical doubts by the end of the Meditations -- Divide up theme readings in groups
Sept. 13	Philosophical Theme Readings… Your group, as a whole, needs to read all of the readings (both “thematically central” and “thematically relevant”). You should divide these up so that each central reading gets at least two people looking it over, and at least one reading it carefully.	Prepare a draft of your five-class-session plan.	Philosophical Theme Group work. In groups, you should finalize your philosophical theme plan.
Sept. 18	Descartes-Elizabeth Correspondence (170-190)	Submit your complete Philosophical Theme Plan today!	-- Descartes and Elizabeth on mind and body -- Descartes and Elizabeth on ethics -- Descartes’s moral theory as expressed in his correspondence
Sept. 20	Sor Juana, “Let us Pretend I am Happy”, pp. 573-575. (Reading ahead is optional.)	Your Descartes papers are due no later than 5 PM on Friday, September 22^nd. They should be emailed to me in accordance with my paper submission requirements (see “turning in your work” above).	Philosophical Mini-Theme. We can settle on something different if we want, but our default will be a “mind-body day”. You’ll each take a philosopher and role play them as we debate the relationship between mind and body and finally solve this vexing philosophical problem.
Sept 25	Philosophical Theme #1, Moral Philosophy. Selections from Mandeville, to be read in class.	Submit the topic for your paper on a philosophical topic.
Sept. 27	Moral Philosophy Day Two: Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals p. 818-822; 828b-837a ; 847a- 851a
Oct. 2	Moral Philosophy Day Three. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals p. 2-11 (available on the web…use the website and code that is available at the top of the table of contents in your book)	Submit three possible questions for your paper on a philosophical topic.
Oct. 4	Moral Philosophy Day Four: Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inquiry Among Men p. 876 - 886a
Oct. 9	Freedom and Autonomy, Day One: Hobbes: Of Liberty and Necessity (pp. 81-84), Leviathan (pp. 40a-41b, pp. 54b-55a, pp. 58b-59a (§§49-54)) Hume: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (pp. 799-816 but focus on 799b, 803a, 805b, 806b, and 807b-814a)	Unit #1 Celebration of Learning Due
Oct. 11	Freedom and Autonomy, Day Two: Spinoza: Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (pp. 369, pp. 380b-381a, pp. 382b-384b, pp. 384b-387b, p. 432, pp. 443a-446b, pp. 447a-488b, p. 457) Note: p. 369: Read the Definitions pp. 380b-381a: Read Prop. 28 pp. 382b-384b: Read Prop. 33 pp. 384b-387b: Read the Appendix I ■ ■ p. 432: Read the Definitions and Axiom ■ ■ pp. 443a-446b: Read the Appendix IV ■ ■ pp. 447a-488b: Read Preface V p. 457: Read Prop. 42
Oct. 16	Freedom and Autonomy, Day Three: Leibniz: Theodicy (pp. 537-543), Discourse on Metaphysics (Sections XIII, XXX, XXXI)	Send at least 600 words addressing the question you will answer in your paper on a philosophical topic.
Oct. 18	Freedom and Autonomy, Day Four: Sor Juana: Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz (pp. 576-582) Astell: Some Reflections Upon Marriage (pp. 624-631b)
Oct. 23	Feminism, Day One. Van Schurman, A Dissertation on the Natural Capacity of Women for Study and Learning, pp. 129a-137b. Focus especially on The Introduction (pp. 129a-131a); Arguments 1, 3, 9, 11, and 14; and ‘A Refutation of Opponents’ through the first argument by opponents.	Unit #2 Celebration of Learning Due (NA)
Oct. 25	Feminism, Day Two. Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz by Sor Juana, pages 576-582.
Oct. 30	Feminism, Day Three. Gabriel Suchon, Treatise on Ethics and Politics (pp. 270-280) Focus on her Definition of Freedom, Description of Constraint. Madame de Maintenon, On Constraint (468a-469a) and On the Drawbacks of Marriage (469a-471a), Of the Utility of Reflection (472a-474b), Of the Single Life (474a-476b)	Send at least 600 words in which you bring at least two modern philosophers into conversation with your emerging ideas for your paper on a philosophical topic.
Nov. 1	Feminism, Day Four. Gournay, The Equality of Men and Women (pages 32-38)
Nov. 6	Epistemology, Day One. Sor Juana, Response of the Poet, pp. 578b-581b. Astell, A Serious Proposal, pp 616a-619b, §IV, Rule VI.	Unit #4 Celebration of Learning Due Email me a provisional thesis for your paper on a philosophical topic
Nov. 8	Epistemology, Day Two. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Chapters VIII and XXIII, pp. 312b-317b, 434a-345b. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, pp. 671a-682b.
Nov. 13	Epistemology, Day Three. Spinoza, Ethics, Concerning God (Axioms and Definitions), pp. 369a-370b On the Nature and Origin of the Mind, pp. 388b (P13), 394b (P18), 398b (P47), 408b.	Email me, in the proper format, a full draft of your paper on a philosophical topic.
Nov. 15	Epistemology, Day Four. Kant, Prolegomena, pp. 933-944.	Before class, email me, in the proper format, a full draft of your paper on a philosophical topic. You should bring a copy of your paper to class. By Friday the 17^th, submit your Celebration of Learning for Unit #4.
Thanksgiving Break
Nov. 27	Class Presentations, reading TBD by presenters		Class Presentations
Nov. 29	Class Presentations, reading TBD by presenters		Class Presentations
Dec. 4	Class Presentations, reading TBD by presenters		Class Presentations
Dec. 6	Class Presentations, reading TBD by presenters	Email me, in the proper format, the final draft of your paper on a philosophical topic.	Class Presentations
Dec. 13	Final Exam 2 - 4 PM