A rough guide.

If you have never taken a philosophy course before, you will find it is a bit different from most of your other subjects. Don’t let this put you off. As long as you understand what is going on, and what you have to learn, you will be able to learn it.

What is going on?

You ask them.

 ”Philosophy is an ACTIVITY!” they will say. “Philosophy is what philosophers do!”

 

Right.

Very helpful.

So what do they do? And how do they do it?

 What Philosophers Do

 Philosophers try to find answers to ultimate questions.

Don’t confuse ultimate questions with urgent or important questions. 

“Where’s the toilet?” can, sometimes, be a very urgent question. To avoid embarrassment, you need the answer very quickly.

“Am I pregnant?” is a very important question. The answer “yes” might change your life completely. (Usually it is a good idea to get the answer fairly quickly, as well. Leave it too long, and the answer might be “Not any more. Now you are a mother.”)

Those questions aren’t trivial, but they are not ultimate. 

Ultimate questions are those about the basic nature of reality (Metaphysics) , about what makes something right or wrong, and whether it is possible to know whether something is right or wrong, (Ethics) and about what it is to know anything at all in the first place (Epistemology)

Philosophers try to use arguments to find the answers, and to criticise the answers that other philosophers offer.

How they do it.

For example, I present the following argument.

1.  All people owe their primary loyalty to the country which sustains them.

2.  Immigrants are sustained by the country they migrate to.

3.  Therefore immigrants owe their primary loyalty to the country they migrate to. 

Another Philosopher may well disagree, and argue against me. He might, for example, argue that my first premise “all people owe their primary loyalty to the country which sustains them” is wrong.   I then have to provide arguments to support that premise.

Another Philosopher (AP) tries to find some mistake in those arguments, or provide arguments that another first premise (e.g. “all people owe their primary loyalty to the country of their grandparents”) is preferable.

I then try to meet the criticisms and show that my arguments survive them, and show that AP’s premise is not as good as mine. (E.g. I could argue (a) that people whose grandparents came from different countries would owe primary loyalty to several countries, which is inconsistent with the concept of primary loyalty, and (b) the choice of grandparents is arbitrary. Why not parents, great-grandparents, or cousins?)

Yet Another Philosopher will argue about the whole idea of primary loyalty, or suggest that it should be owed to persons rather than any country.

And so it goes on. Sometimes agreement is reached, but more often it isn’t.  But we have fun arguing, and sometimes even learn something.  Usually we learn how confused our ideas (e.g. ideas of loyalty) are, and occasionally we find ways of reducing that confusion a bit.  That’s a good thing, in case you were wondering.

 

What do you have to learn?

There are two main types of philosophy courses for beginners. These are topic-based courses, and history-based courses.

Topic-based courses. 

These concentrate on a limited set of philosophical questions, and the arguments used to support the various answers.

Thus, a course on Epistemology will examine the issue of what counts as knowledge, and the role of experience and reason in developing knowledge.

A course on Ethics will examine the questions of right and wrong, of duty, obligation, and human conduct.

A course on Business Ethics will examine the particular moral problems that arise in the context of business.

Introductory courses often discuss several topics at a fairly elementary level.

If you are taking a topic-based course, you will be expected to learn the following: 

1.  What the questions and issues are.

2.  What answers have been offered.

3.  What arguments support those answers.

4.  What criticisms of those arguments have been made.

 5.  What replies have been made to those criticisms.

History-based courses.

Typically, these examine the ideas of a series of Great Philosophers in particular time period. Such courses usually examine the positions and arguments of the philosophers on several topics, and show how the ideas of the previous philosophers were developed and criticised by the later philosophers.

For example, I teach a course on the ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. In it I concentrate mostly on the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics.

If you are taking a history-based course, you will be expected to learn the following:

1.  What the questions and issues are.

2.  What answers each Great Philosopher offered.

3.  What arguments supported those answers.

4.  What criticisms of those arguments have been made, particularly by later Great Philosophers in the course.

5.  What ideas of the earlier philosophers were developed by the later Great Philosophers.

You do not learn the biographies of the Great Philosophers.

 

Now that you’ve got a rough idea of what you

are supposed to learn, it’s time to start

research.

Go to the Research Tips page.