Philosophy Project - You're Such a Character!

Today's goal focuses on identifying the piece(s) of literature you will use for section 2 of your project. All year we've raised philosophical questions about the characters in the plays, novels, and books we've read: What motivates them? Why do they do what they do? How are they shaped / changed? How do they shape / change others? And many more.

Your goal is to identify a character who speaks to your question in some way. It may not be a direct connection, and it may be that the character completely disagrees with your perspective on the issue. In any case, their experiences and actions and thoughts will be a different lens for you to use to explore your question. Think of the ways in which your question appears in the text and how it is similar to or different from what you've already named.

In this section you will walk your reader through the text, closely examining various parts of the story and linking it back to your question. Note that you may find it useful to use a variety of characters from one text to get to your point. Also, many people who have worked on this project in my previous classes have found it to be helpful to compare / contrast characters from two or more texts in order to give a more complete look at the issue.

Feel free to return to your previous essays and writings to help you with this section.

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By today you should have a good sense of the variety of ideas, issues, and sub-questions involved in answering your question. This will help you to break it down into pieces to write about in each section, and help you to organize them into a clear flow of ideas.

For tomorrow, the flow will be a little different as we engage in written partner dialogues. These will take the entire period - and will complete that section of your assignment - so do not plan on having other writing time during class tomorrow.

Philosophy Project - Lots of Resources for Section 3

Good morning!

The step of finding which philosopher you want to work with can be a challenge. However, once you learn to use the resources I've placed here, things should move along much more efficiently.

• Step 1 - Use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to read about what different philosopher have said about your subject.
• The key to making this a success is using the right "key words." You may find something right away with your original search terms. If not, read the articles and keep track of the words they are using to discuss the issue. Words like "metaphysics" or "epistemology" might not be the first ones you tried, but they may yield significantly better results!
• Step 2 - Find the actual text, including which section of it is relevant to your question. Under the "Resources" tab, I added a list of links to the philosophical texts I think will be used most often for this project. Also, on the right hand side, I added in a link to the Liberty Fund's Online Library - there are links there to just about any text you need.

Once you find the text, read it carefully - spend time with it - listen to what it has to say and how it makes its argument. Maybe it is totally different from the way you thought about these issues and opens up new possibilities for you. Maybe you completely disagree with it. There are many possibilities.

Your goal with section 3 is to bring the voice of your chosen philosopher(s) into your project. You are explaining and clarifying their ideas - summarizing the key points, showing the different parts of their argument, and highlighting key quotations. Later, in section 5, you will think and write about how it links to your project overall.

Happy reading, writing, and thinking!

Philosophy Essay - Envisioning the next two weeks

Happy rainy Monday!
Not many Mondays of high school left!
I hope you had a great weekend.

For today, the goal is to get your head around your research strategy and the timetable of the next two weeks. We will meet in the computer lab every day and the time is entirely yours.

By now, hopefully you have written a significant portion of part 1. This will not only help you to clarify your question(s) and the (potential) focus of your work, but also give you more language to use when you are searching for a philosopher.  Identifying key terms is an essential step for successful research.

Thinking about the literary text you will use is also a priority item. The choice might be a clear one, or it might require going back to both the text and the essay(s) you wrote about it.  Your issue might not have been raised directly in the text, but for any of your questions there will certainly be something to work with in it.

Also, keep in mind that the dialogues will take place during class on Thursday. There is no special preparation you need to do for that day. You will write all of section 4 that day, so do not plan on having class time to do work on different sections.

Lastly, feel free to check in with me at any point during the process, either during class or my office hours. I'm happy to help you in any way I can!

May your thinking be filled with powerful thoughts and questions!

Finding a Philosopher

Greetings! As you have probably noticed, I am not in school today. I am teaching a workshop at a conference in New York.  Your work for today will be focused on starting the exploration of different philosophers with the goal of finding one (or more) to work with on your project.  The steps below will be helpful, but I'll add some extra explanation. Note that you do not need to do this step today - if you want to wait until Monday to start looking for your philosopher, that is fine.  But for those who want to get started, I recommend going to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The search engine there, and in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, will lead you to articles summarizing the thought of different thinkers on your issue. Note that there are many ways to ask your question, so it will help to build up a vocabulary of different search terms. Type in one you think will work, then browse through the articles that come up. These are just summaries of the philosophical arguments - not the texts themselves. That will be the second step - see below. The "philosopher proposal" below is optional, but I do want to be sure to know who you plan to work with for a variety of reasons - between making sure you have a valid source to pointing you to the best article from that person, I am here to help your work be excellent. Happy hunting and reading. Have a great weekend - see you Monday!

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The main goal for today is to clarify which philosopher(s) you will use for your project.  The steps you can use toward this involve using the search engines I gave you on the right side of the blog:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Philosophy Pages

To effectively use these search engines you will need to use keywords - terms people discussing your issue typically use.  How do you identify what these are?  Basically it comes from trial and error.  Try a word or two, see what types or articles it takes you to, read those to see how they are treating the issue, see what other words people are using, and repeat.

I also have several of my own books available for you to use.  I will bring these to the computer lab each day.  They are organized by topics and questions and I think you'll find them to be helpful.

One *optional* goal for today is to send me your "Philosopher Proposal" (the form is on the blog under "handouts") - don't stress over this one - it's just a way of keeping in touch with me about how your search is going.  Please note this is a step that can be as formal or informal as you like, and can even be completed by just having a brief conversation with me.

The other goal for today is to find the actual texts written by the author you plan to use.

There are a variety of sites that will be helpful for that, starting with the links we already have.

1. Go to Philosophy Pages.  Click on "dictionary" at the top of the page.  Click the letter of the person you are searching for then look for him / her on the list.  Click "Life and Works" and you will find links to many of the full-text versions of their works!
2. Go to Project Gutenberg's Philosophy Bookshlef.  Simply scroll down this page and I think you'll easily be able to find a link to the work you are looking for.
3. Do a Google search! 
   It’s actually not as hard as you think – you’re just a Goolge search away from finding just about any essay I think you’ll need for this project.  Just read through the overviews on the topic you are interested in provided on the websites listed above.  Then, once you have discovered a writer and the name of a particular essay, just plug those into Google using a formula like this:
   (Author Last Name) + (One or Two key words from title) + “full text”
   
   
   Here are three quick examples I did:
   
   
   Essay: David Hume’s “Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”
   
   
               I Googled “Hume Enquiry Full Text”
   and found it here: http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html
   
   
   Essay: Rene Descartes’ “Meditations on First Philosophy”
   
   
               I Googled “Descartes First Full Text”
   And found it here: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/meditations/meditations.html
   
   
   Essay: William James’ “On the Varieties of Religious Experience”
   
   
               I Googled “William James Varieties Religious full Text”
               And found it here: http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/james.html#will
   
   
   All three of those are either the first or second link to come up in the Google search.  Even after you find it, don’t just print it!  Take the time to read it and work though it – you may only need to print a section of it.
   
   

Forming Philosophical Questions

Happy Monday!

• By the end of the period today you will submit your question proposal to me.  Here is a link to the form with some very basic questions. The goal here is just to get the ball rolling and to give me a chance to engage in some conversation with you about your ideas.  Please paste the form into a new google document, complete it, and submit it to me through turnitin.com. This is the easiest way for me to keep track of and respond to your work.

Today you will work on choosing the philosophical question (or assertion) that will become the focus of your essay. In your packet I gave you a series of possible questions to consider, as well as questions for you to use to expand and focus your thinking.

• click here for a digital copy of that handout
• click here for a link to the slideshow from class the other day

Here are some other resources from the web I've gathered. Browse through them today - see if anything catches your eye:

• 8 philosophical questions we'll never solve
• Rick Wayne's top 10 greatest philosophical questions of all time
• The ten big questions
• 10 Fundamental questions
• Philosophical theories and ideas

Once you have an idea you think you want to work with, I recommend doing some free-writing about it. This may form the basis of what you will write in section 1.  You may want to use these questions we tested out when we discussed Frankl's book last week:

1. What are its assumptions and premises?
1. What is it assuming to be true?
2. What conditions is it assuming to exist?
3. What is it suggesting about the different people involved?
2. What are its implications?
1. If this is true then what else is true?  Why?
3. What different types or contexts exist?
1. When does / doesn’t it work?
4. What do the specific terms mean?
5. Who else shares this belief or perspective, and why?
1. Are there other people in the book who this does / doesn’t apply to?  Why?
6. Where do you stand in terms of this idea?
1. Do you agree / disagree with it?
2. Does it apply only in certain circumstances?
3. Do you only accept parts of the idea?

Here are two examples of a brainstormed series of questions.  One tries to narrow it down and sharpen the focus, while the other seeks to expand it.

How do I narrow down my question? 

How do I make my question manageable and specific?

For example:  What is the meaning of life?

• Whose life am I talking about?
• What gives my life meaning?
• What do I mean by “meaning”?
• What can I do to give my life the kind of meaning that makes my spirit soar, that makes me feel like I’m making this world a little better place to live in?
• What speaks for and against each of these perspectives?
• How can I give my life the kind of meaning that makes my life worthwhile for me?

How do I expand my question?  How can I more thoroughly explore it?

For example:  How can we overcome alienation?

·         Is alienation something we always want to overcome?

·         How does our life change for the better / worse if we are alienated?

·         What are the different types or degrees of alienation?

o   Is it possible to be completely alienated?

·         What exactly does alienation mean?  What does it mean to overcome it?

·         Are we able to control being alienated?

·         Why would others want to alienate someone?

The Philosophy Project

Today I formally assigned the Philosophy project. You can find links to all of the handout under the "Resources" tab above. I will post every handout there.

To save you a step, click here for an overview of the project.

If you want to get a jump on things and already have an idea about your question, please feel free to use this form to submit your proposal: philosophy question proposal

Examining Philosophical Assertions

Today in class we continued on work on how we ask philosophical questions.

Using the set of questions on this handout you each wrote about two sections of Part 1 of the book.  The idea was that even though these might not be the questions you will work with for your essay, this is still helping you to know how best to explore your issue once you identify it.

Here are the questions we used:

1. What are its assumptions and premises?
1. What is it assuming to be true?
2. What conditions is it assuming to exist?
3. What is it suggesting about the different people involved?
2. What are its implications?
1. If this is true then what else is true?  Why?
3. What different types or contexts exist?
1. When does / doesn’t it work?
4. What do the specific terms mean?
5. Who else shares this belief or perspective, and why?
1. Are there other people in the book who this does / doesn’t apply to?  Why?
6. Where do you stand in terms of this idea?
1. Do you agree / disagree with it?
2. Does it apply only in certain circumstances?
3. Do you only accept parts of the idea?

Man's Search for Meaning - The Holocaust

Elie Wiesel - Night

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."