How Handwriting Boosts the Brain

How Handwriting Boosts the Brain

At what age philosophy?

 At what age philosophy?

Fostering reasoning skills in young people can improve learning outcomes and one way of doing this is by teaching philosophy. 

Children are naturally curious and constantly asking "why?" 

Studying philosophy helps them not only explore answers to these sorts of questions, but develops critical thinking.

Brian Leiter – “Should we respect religion?”

Brian Leiter – “Should we respect religion?”

 In Chapter IV of Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter asks whether/why we should respect religion. The point here is to consider whether religion might merit something more than mere toleration, i.e. putting up with something that you don’t (necessarily) approve of.

How many great books have you actually read?

How many great books have you actually read?

 Scan the list, and say how many you’ve read.

 I think most people studying or teaching philosophy have read large parts of what we might call ‘the good stuff’, and we confuse reading that with actually reading the whole of a work.

(I think of myself as having read Berkeley’s Principles, but I really only know the good bit, which is to say the arguments for idealism at the start — God alone knows what’s in the second half of the book.)

Here's a list.

1. The Republic, Plato
2. Organon, Aristotle
3. Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
4. City of God, Augustine
5. Summa theologiae, Aquinas
6. The Prince, Machiavelli
7. Novum Organum, Francis Bacon
8. Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes
9. Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes
10. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
11. Ethics, Spinoza
12. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
13. Monadology, Leibniz
14. Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley
15. A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume
16. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume
17. The Social Contract, Rousseau
18. The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham
19. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
20. Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel
21. Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
22. Vindication of the rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
23. Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard
24. Method of Ethics, Sidgwick
25. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche
26. Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
27. Principia Ethica, G. E. Moore
28. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
29. Tractatus, Wittgenstein
30. Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
31. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre
32. The Second Sex, de Beauvoir

Well, how many have you read, page by page, cover to cover?



Posted by James Garvey on  Talking Philosophy  October 8, 2012

Heideggar and The Experience of Poetic Language

Undergraduate Philosophy Journals

There are a number of journals that either accept or specialize in publishing undergraduate work. Most are published only once or twice a year, either online or in print form. Be sure to check each journal's submission requirements, deadlines and areas of emphasis. Here are a few suggestions:

Aporia (Brigham Young University)
Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (University of San Francisco)
The Dualist (Stanford University)
Episteme: An International Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy (Denison University)
GNOSIS (Concordia University)
Meteorite (University of Michigan)
Prolegomena (University of British Columbia)
Prometheus: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Johns Hopkins University
Stoa (Santa Barbara City College)
The Yale Philosophy Review (Yale University)

For additional student-related journals, visit EpistemeLinks.