• Life Advice & Visual Arts Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    🌌 Share Your Dreams! 🌌
    📸 15 Years of Photo Contests 📸
  • LAVA Moderator: streaM Freak

Philosophy course?

tetris1

tetris1

Greenlighter
Joined
Mar 6, 2010
Messages
10
Location
America's little(err) big hat.
I was wondering what someone would typically learn/do in a college/university level philosophy course. It would be good if anybody who's taken a philosophy course could talk a bit about what they did/learned, especially in a first level course.
 
I took an entry level course in Philosophy. Obviously there are many different subjects in philosophy.

My class was on "Contemporary moral issues" It was highly easy/ cool... and if you have access to something similar I highly reccomend taking it.

It is about current issues.. such as the war on drugs and abortion... gambling... I can't remember much I took it 3 years ago and was smoking and taking alot of benzos back then... but it was one of my favorite classes.
 
oh man, if you have the chance, take a course on logical reasoning. it teaches you how think, and how to never lose an argument. best class I ever took.
 
I've never taken a philosophy course, but I doubt they teach you anything couldn't learn by yourself with a little bit of reading. Try reading "Sophie's World" and "Philosophy Goes to the Movies" if you want a basic introduction to philosophy. But I read those and wanted more in depth knowledge, so I just searched for social theory, political theory, ethics, metaphysics, etc. on Amazon and bought whatever showed up. If you search for older editions of textbooks, they are really cheap. Definitely cheaper than college courses, at least.

I second toa$t's recommendation to take a logic course. If there is any area of philosophy that people should know, it's logic. I think it should be a mandatory class in high schools, actually.
 
I'm planning on studying a philosophy course and getting a phd. While not having taken yet anything I've done some research and hanged out with a few poeple involved in teaching and studying, and I would say there is a lot to learn and plenty of benefits from studying yourself in an academic environment. I've studied philosophy indepndently almost my whole life and there is a lot of things I'm missing studying by myself.

What to expect? maybe you could download the course program from your local university. Or even better go there and ask the professors what should you expect to learn/do in there.
 
@marsmwellow
Thanks for the reply, I don't have the money to buy every book I see on amazon, though. Also, when I was in highschool, our math course had a (small) unit on logic and reasoning. Maybe it's just in Canada?
 
your math class probably taught formal logic. Informal logic, critical thinking and inductive reasoning are FAR more useful. honestly, I use that stuff every day.
 
My intro course was great, and set me up for quite a few future courses. We didn't use a standardized text; he just selected a few works that the class went through over the course of the semester, interspersed with essay tests. We studied Plato's early dialogues, Descartes, Berkeley, and a few contemporary philosophers; though maybe it was just the prof, I'd say the bent was largely epistemological.

In my op, a good prof makes all the difference (with personal enthusiasm, of course); you might want to ask around if more than one instructor is teaching it.

As for logic...I wouldn't recommend that for a beginner. Some people are great at it (particularly if they're already good at math), but many never make the leap. Much logic supervenes from basic philosophical discussion, making the later transition to "real" logic less jarring, IMO. Just my two bits.
 
^^
Agreed.

It's impossible for people to tell you what's going to be an intro philosophy course since it will vary according to the university and the person who's assembling and teaching the course. My intro philosophy course was very superficial, covering a little bit of basic ethics, ontology and epistemology. Later courses I took were much more difficult. Like in many subjects, I think first year is often used to ease people in to the idea of thinking for themselves in an educational institution. I think students generally enjoy first year philosophy.
 
^Agreed with the above two.

I took a course called Philosophy of Religion with a fantastic professor, and it was a great class. We did the basics of ontology/epistemology/etc as you would in most intro phil classes and applied it all to the "theory" of religion - essentially testing whether major religious ideals are consistent/internally valid (i.e. god cannot be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent yet fit in with Judeo-Christian religious dogma even though they claim that god is all three).
 
What sort of career would this set you up for? It sounds really interesting but it doesn't look like it is of much practical use career wise
 
i took PHIL 120. overall it was a great class, easy too. you learn about the arguements of god vs no god, the allegory of the cave, what is reality and perception, and about many different philosophers, great to go to if youre high. haha
 
Took Plato's Republic in uni. 1st year course. We read about 10-20 pages or so before every class...and then were "quizzed" on something specific, answering a question, writing on something for 10 minutes.

Incidentally, (and this is where philosophy is great because it makes you think, who knew!), we got a C if we answered the question correctly. C = Satisfactory.
B and higher we actually added something to the answer or went beyond answering the question. Afterwards, there was discussion on what we read and the question, and just general dialogue between the Prof and the class. It was probably the most entirely opposite experience of any high school class dynamic
I have ever experienced. Yeah its university but to this day I've never experienced a class like it.

On the thinking bit, you started to look past the text and apply it to current events or your opinion on what they were talking about. It was also an incredibly hard course for students coming from public school where you had no experience with this type of class situation. A few bright kids really caught on, and the rest of us where like "uh....."

Its great brain candy and highly recommended.
 
My first philosophy class was on modernism and postmodernism. Just because it doesn't set you up for a career does not mean it's not worthwhile. Sometimes learning is done for the sake of learning, not in order to tick some box in a job interview.
 
Also i think it teaches you how to question basic things, why do we take things at face value, accept them as just "what everyone does".Or say "that's just how things work". i think this is one of the most valuable skills you can learn, and is relevant to ANY job.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top