Class Goals

This class has several goals. In no particular order, some of the most important ones are as follows:

Theme: Rationality

The class is explicitly an exploration of rationality. I do not know what rationality is, but I think I know some important components of what generally passes for rational and I know some important questions to ask about it. Among these are:
  1. Classifications of things: if you want to know about X's, one of the most important questions to ask is what kind of X's are there, how do they differ, and why.
  2. Given that most traits of animals have some evolutionary explanation, what explanation is there for rationality?
  3. What are emotions? How do they relate to reason? Can we use reason to analyze them? Are we generally right in our thoughts about emotions?
  4. Whatever rationality is, it seems there is something that distinguishes us from animals and it has to do with rationality. How do we differ from animals?
  5. How did humans come to consider rationality explicitly? Where? Why? What were the immediate results? What did those humans "think" before they had any explicit thoughts about thought?
  6. It takes a great deal of courage to believe what reason tells us: examples?
  7. Rationality must be how we decide what there is in the world.
  8. Systematic doubt is both destructive of and constructive of good reasoning.
  9. Distinctions between beliefs. Some beliefs have justification, some stand a damned good chance of being "true," others are not true or false at all (but we still believe them), some have no justification and need none. Some people think that knowledge is different from belief: a possible way to explain the difference is that knowledge is justified and true, whereas belief need not be either.
  10. The idea that humans choose rationally is a powerful hypothesis that leads to tremendous results in social science fields. What are its roots? Can it be right?
  11. One of the most important results of rationality is the formation of rules. What constitutes a rule, a principle, etc., and what does it mean for rationality to break or abide by one?
  12. Are there instances when the most "rational" and systematic planning leads directly, not accidentally, to disaster?
  13. Is there reason in nature? Does "nature" have a "reason" for what it does?
  14. What would it mean to "live rationally"?

The method of this class is a kind of madness: we will hop back and forth between antiquity and modernity. This may be disorienting, but it has the uncanny ability to reveal interesting aspects of whatever we discuss. It shakes things up and makes you not just think outside of the box, but look at the box itself. Sometimes, we will find that what we read about in antiquity is simply the historical predecessor to what we are doing. At other times, we will find that we have made a radical break with antiquity. Sometimes, we will find that ancient literature speaks to a problem as well today as it presumably did then. We should not look for one pattern to the juxtapositions of ancient with modern.