electiveHQ

This course is a hands-on guide to how to do philosophy. We will consider in turn three or four philosophical questions, loosely derived from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. These will include questions like the following: (1) Could robots (like Marvin) have real thoughts and feelings; (2) Is time travel possible? (3) Are we entitled to eat animals (even supposing they ask us to)? The students and lecturers will collaborate to establish possible answers, find some arguments in the philosophical literature, work out new arguments of our own and criticize arguments. We will work on some basic skills like essay writing, critical close reading, informal logic, and avoiding plagiarism. We will rely heavily on the Discussion Board facility in Blackboard to communicate ideas between students and lecturer. Assessment will be 50% based on weekly postings by students to this Discussion Board, much of it done in group work. Each week half of the two-hour lecture slot will be dedicated to small group work where the students take on particular tasks in their groups and post the results to Blackboard. Attendance at these sessions will be mandatory as this is where the bulk of the (assessed) work for the course will be done.