Schedule | Requirements Grades
PHIL 3324 – Spring 2022 Syllabus
Professor: Matthew J. Brown
Course Modality and Expectations
Per the order of President Benson, the first three weeks of class will be in an online, synchronous modality, with meetings during our scheduled class time (via Discord). I will run these meetings as a close approximation of a discussion-oriented in-person classroom.
Students unable to participate synchronously due to illness will have access to pre-recorded lecture material, asynchronous discussion via Perusall assignments, and virtual appointments with the professor. Grades will not be penalized for lack of attendance. Class sessions will not be recorded and made available for non-attending students.
Course Description
This course is an intensive study of texts significant in the history of philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States.
The primary goal of this course is to come to understand philosophy as both an academic discipline and a set of ideas and discourses that crosses disciplinary and academic boundaries. Although schools of philosophy have existed since ancient times in various locations around the globe, and University education in “philosophy” is a pre-modern institution, philosophy in Europe and North America really only began to professionalize as a recognizable discipline in the 18th century, a process that crystallized in the early 19th century in Germany and somewhat later that century in the U.K. and U.S. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, reflection on the nature of philosophy as a discipline has thus been a significant theme. This period also saw the fracturing of philosophy into the disciplines of philosophy and psychology and the distinct movements that we know as analytic philosophy, Continental philosophy, American pragmatism, and others. In addition, women, people of color, and non-European philosophical traditions, which had been aggressively marginalized in the nineteenth century, began to have increasing influence over the discipline throughout the course of the twentieth, leading to the increasing visibility of, e.g., feminist and Africana philosophy.
In order to understand the development of philosophy over this crucial span, we will closely examine a wide variety of philosophical texts from the period covering many of these traditions, as well as engaging with texts that discuss the large historical movement of philosophy in the period. Closely reading and analyzing these texts is also a second philosophically valuable goal, sharpening our interpretive and argumentative skills as well as expanding the breadth of our understanding of the landscape of philosophical problems and views.
Student Learning Objectives
- Students will demonstrate close reading skills that allow them to understand the argument and deep structure of a text.
- Students will demonstrate an ability to articulate and defend, as well as recognize and critique, philosophical claims and arguments.
- Students will engage with central philosophical concepts and ideas that were developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- Students will display a broad knowledge of contemporary philosophical traditions and the historical movements in the time period that influenced them, and the reasons for the significance of these traditions and movements.
- Students will develop skills of collaboration and communication with peers in pursuit of research and analysis.
Schedule of Topics
Readings and assignment due dates available via eLearning.
| Date | Topic | Readings |
|---|---|---|
| 1/18 | Introduction and Background | |
| 1/25 | John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill | On Liberty (selections) |
| 2/1 | Karl Marx | “Estranged Labour” and “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” |
| 2/8 | Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche | Concluding Unscientific Postscript (selections) and Twilight of the Idols (selections) |
| 2/15 | Gottlob Frege | “On Sense and Reference” |
| 2/22 | Edmund Husserl | Logical Investigations (selections) |
| 3/1 | William James and Anna Julia Cooper | “The Will to Believe” and “The Gain from a Belief” |
| 3/8 | Jane Addams and Emma Goldman | Democracy and Social Ethics (selections) and Anarchism and Other Essays (selections) |
| 3/15 | Spring Break | |
| 3/22 | John Dewey | “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” |
| 3/29 | W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin | “The Souls of White Folk” and “The American Dream and the American Negro” |
| 4/5 | Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Carnap | “What is Metaphysics?” and “Overcoming Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” |
| 4/12 | Susan Stebbing | “The Method of Analysis of Metaphysics” |
| 4/19 | W.V.O. Quine and Morton White | “Epistemology Naturalized” and “Normative Ethics, Normative Epistemology, and Quine’s Holism” |
| 4/26 | Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis | “The New Forms of Control” and “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation” |
| 5/3 | John Rawls and Judith Jarvis Thompson | “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics” and “A Defense of Abortion” |
Requirements and Grades
Main Graded Assignments
- Perusall Reading and Annotation
- Argument Diagrams
- Book Reviews
- Class Participation
Grading Princples
Individual assignments in this course will largely be graded on a binary, “satisfactory/credit” or “unsatisfactory/no credit” basis. There will be no partial credit. Your final grade for the course will be decided by the number and type of assignments you choose to, and are able to successfully complete, rather than on a weighted average of your qualitative performance on each individual item. While this approach, known as “specifications grading,” may be unfamiliar, it has a variety of proven advantages.
Why Specifications Grading?
This course uses a form of grading based called “specifications grading” developed by Linda B. Nilson. It is a framework that offers you greater flexibility and autonomy, while asking you to take responsibility for directing your own learning. Specifications grading is based in the principles of adult learning theory, which hold that you will learn more effectively, feel more engaged, and derive greater satisfaction from your work in a flexible yet challenging learning environment. This grading system makes grading fairer and more transparent; assignments clearly articulate what is required to succeed, without hidden requirements or arbitrariness in assigning scores.
High expectations are important for student success; stressing about grades tends to interfere with learning. Each individual assignment comes with relatively high expectations — “satisfactory” grades are more closely associated with competence or mastery that mere completion. Participation points require not only proof-of-life, but genuinely engaged, thoughtful contributions; satisfactory assignments require you to hit every one of the stated specifications. On the other hand, the sort of fine distinctions between an A, A-, B+ or 98, 96, 89 are not relevant.
This structure gives you the freedom to take some risks, to take control of what you’re learning, and this can lead to better outcomes and a more satisfying learning experience. This is not a structure that rewards you for trying to please the instructor; it removes some of the incentives to “play it safe,” and allows you to earn full points even when you’re being creative, within the requirements of the assignment. On the other hand, if what you want out of this class is more modest — to pass this class while you deal with something more stressful or more central to your personal goals — this structure allows you to make that decision, and makes it transparent what amount of work is necessary to do that.
Grading Tiers
| Assignment / Grade | A | B | C | D |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perusall assignments | 18 | 14 | 10 | 6 |
| Participation points | 12 | 10 | 6 | 0 |
| Argument diagrams | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| Book Review | ||||
| – Presentation | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| – Written Review | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
Tokens
Some flexibility is added to the course via the “token” system. You each begin the semester with 2 tokens. At the end of the semester, tokens can be spent in the following way:
- Free credit on one Perusall assignment
- Free participation point
- Revise an unsatisfactory argument diagram or (written) book review
- 5 tokens convert to a + grade.
Tokens can be earned in the following ways:
- Exemplary performance on an argument diagram or on group bibliography
- 1 token per 2 excess Perusall assignments above grade level
- 1 token per 2 excess Participation points above grade level
You do not need to keep track of your tokens; they will be assigned automatically in whatever way gives you the highest possible grade for the class.
Examples:
A. You have 16 satisfactory Perusall assignments, 7 participation points, 2 satisfactorily argument diagrams, and you completed a book review presentation and written review with a satisfactory grade. These all meet the minimum requirements for a B, except the participation points, which are 3 lower than needed. Your 2 extra Perusall assignments above a 14 earn you 1 token, for a total of 3 tokens. These are used for 3 free participation points, giving you the minimum needed to meet the specifications for a B.
B. You have 10 satisfactory Perusall assignments, 12 participation points, 1 argument diagram, and you did a Book review, but the written portion was not satisfactory. Your 6 extra participation points above the 6 required for a C give you 3 extra tokens, for a total of 5. You use these to earn a C+ rather than a C for the class.
C. Your first argument diagram was unsatisfactory; you did not feel you understood the assignment, and what you produced missed the mark in several respects. Based on the feedback, you produced a satisfactory second argument diagram, and you feel like you really grasp the idea now. You spend one token in order to submit a revised argument diagram. This leaves you with only 1 token going into the end of semester calculations.
Assignment Descriptions
Perusall Reading and Annotation
All readings will be posted via Perusall, typically one or two readings per week. To get credit, you will need to make at least 4 annotations on each reading, make high-quality annotations, and respond to your peers’ annotations. It helps if you go through each reading more than once.
Your annotations should focus on four types of thoughts about the reading: (a) drawing attention to passages you find particularly valuable, insightful, or thought-provoking, and explaining why; (b) explaining what is strong/weak about the arguments in the reading; (c) asking significant questions about the reading aimed at gaining deeper understanding; (d) drawing connections to other ideas and other readings.
Perusall grades your annotations and questions automatically using an algorithm that holistically considers their quantity, quality, relevance, and engagement, and gives you credit for the assignment if your contributions meet a certain threshold. It tends to give a low score for comments that are too brief, that are too broad or vague or unrelated to the text, to mere expressions of confusion rather than thoughtful attempts to wrangle with the meaning of the text. Thoughtful, detailed, relevant, and insightful comments and questions get full credit. It also gives you credit for time spent actively reading, for interacting with the annotations of other students, and for receiving comments and upvotes on your own annotations. I will periodically spot-check the work of the algorithm, but I find that it very rarely fails to give credit where credit is due. If you read the entire assignment, write at least 4 detailed, thoughtful annotations about the text, and engage with a few of the annotations of your peers, you will receive full credit. If you try to figure out what the minimal effort required is, you’re likely not to get credit.
To see the breakdown that determines whether you received credit for a particular assignment, go back to the assignment in Perusall, and then click “My scores” in the upper-left of the page. Then, click on that particular assignment’s score in the score column to see the break-down.
Argument Diagrams
This assignment will require you to pick an assigned reading and attempt to understand the deep structure of its argument. While the nature of philosophical writing (and speaking) is typically linear, the relationship of ideas thus communicated, the way that claims are presented by premises and assumptions, are typically not so linear. In this assignment, you will devise your own conventions for representing an argument visually, and non-linearly. Will include a key explaining the representations, as well as an explanation of the diagram and what we learn from representing the argument in this way.
Book Reviews
You will write a 1000-1500 word review of a book from an approved list of scholarship on movements, traditions, and disciplinary formations in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and make a 10-15 minute class presentation on it. I will provide a list of approved books, many of which will be on reserve with the library; alternatives may be approved if you consult with me well in advance. You should (1) summarize the argument of the work; (2) engage with by presenting a supporting argument, raising an objection, or posing a serious and specific interpretive difficulty with it; and (3) connect the argument to readings we have done or will do in the class. You must make an appointment to discuss your presentation outline the week before your presentation.
Class Participation Points
Your class participation grade will be based on points for the following activities:
Participation in class discussions (1 point per class) for high-quality contributions
Discuss material in class chat channel (1 point per week) asynchronous version of class discussion
Contribute to collaborative note-taking (1 point per week) Each week there will be a shared note-taking space, where you can earn points for contributing to the note-taking about the class discussion and for cleaning up the notes into a clear and readable document for other students. A good option for those who have trouble speaking on their feet.
Role-Play a Philosopher (3 points) Sign up ahead of time; requires doing additional research on the life and work of a particular philosopher. Spend a few minutes introducing yourself to the class, and then answer questions they have.
Note that typically you can only earn one category of point per week of class, though for particularly high-quality participation on two axes, you might earn two points in the same week.