Dear Students is an Introductory Handout I wrote for my High School Philosophy students. Feel free to use it but please ask first if you intend to use it as a handout.
Links to other sites on the Web
Epistemology class handout I wrote.
Philosophical Anthropology class handout (very rough draft)
DEAR STUDENTS It is my desire to introduce you to philosophy. Philosophy is the systematic attempt to think through the things that we ask fundamental questions about. Sometimes it will seem like philosophy has more questions than answers and so I would like to encourage you to "fall in love with the questions themselves"(Rilke), for "questioning is the piety of thinking" (Heidegger). Also remember to be patient with yourself, and with Philosophy, as you live into the answers. Philosophy is a Greek word composed of two parts, Philos, meaning Love, and Sophia, meaning Wisdom. The word "Philosophy" then means 'the love of wisdom' and a philosopher is 'one who loves wisdom'. Notice that this word does not say that the philosopher is wise or that wisdom is not also found elsewhere. Wisdom is not a matter of having a certain way with words, a technical capacity to use jargon or win an argument, it has to do with entering into living the examined life. For as Socrates says in Plato's Apology; "The unexamined life is not worth living". This capacity for self-examination is not just a matter of reflection, or of critical thinking, it also has to do with having the moral courage to enter upon such a path, to take the risk of calling into question our naive taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and our place in it. Philosophy turns out in part to be a critical examination of this multi-leveled naive participation in everyday life. I like to call this tendency we all have to live our lives without thinking, "epistemic conformity". It is the level of our belief in the reality of the shadow images projected onto the cave wall of our minds by the surrounding culture(see Plato's Allegory of the Cave). The person who is wise may never have studied Philosophy and the person who has devoted their life to the study of Philosophy may not be wise. Nevertheless, philosophy is that discipline that takes on as its proper task the intentional, systematic, passionate cultivation of this propensity of the human spirit to ask foundational questions and to wonder. Philosophy seeks to map out a livable 'conceptual framework' of the whole of reality. A way of 'framing' or interpreting things that is worthy of both the dignity of the human person and is attentive to the varied disclosue of the real, not that either of these are pregiven in an obvious, unambigous, and conceptually clear manner. In one sense Philosophy is inescapable, and unavoidable, in that we can't help but have a world-view, to operate out of a certain overlapping set of perspectives on life. We have already participated in the act of making sense out of our lives and the world around us before we ever get the chance to do so in an intentional, thematic, and reflective way. The Philosophical act of wonder is always a secondary level reflection on primary pre-reflective living. So, whether we want to or not, or whether we asked for it or not, we already have a 'philosophy', we already live our lives out of certain preunderstandings, a set of social constructs, and fragmented perspectives. The first philosophical question then is how will I take ownership for this inescapable human situation? This will toward epistemic ownership is the first act of philosophical reflection, it may come to us developmentally, or as the result of an experience of grief, or some other existential shock to our naively lived world, or it may not come to us at all, we may spend our life trying to cover it up because it is so disturbing, so disconcerting, and because of this we may prejudge philosophy to be dis-ease, a pathology of the human spirit, or the bourgeois pastime of those who are wealthy enough to afford the leisure philosophical reflection calls for. Notice however, that this is itself a philosophical perspective on the project of Philosophy. Again, philosophy turns out to be inescapable, first of all because we live out the circle of our lives in contexts embedded and permeated with unexamined philosophical assumptions, and secondly, because even if we choose to opt out of the philosophical enterprise, and judge it to be a bunch of nonsense, we do so by taking up a set of philosophical positions about such things as rationality, evidence, the human good, education, the knowable etc. And so, in admitting that we cannot escape this 'undertow' of philosophy, let us give ourselves willingly to this task with as much desire and systematic effort as we can. Philosophy seems to have begun in numerous parts of the world around three millenium ago. In Greece with the philosophers since known as the Pre-Socratics, people like Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus who began to ask about the basic stuff the cosmos was made of. In India, with the Upanishads, moving out of the mythic world of the Vedas into the light of systematic reflection on the nature of the self in relationship to the ground of being. In China, with the systematic reflections on education and statecraft of a philosopher such as Confucius. In all three cases there is a systematic break with the preestablished world as defined by the mythic tradition, and an attempt to think the world and human being in critical distance from the surrounding culture. Later, this founding of a different speech becomes more thematic and systematic with philosophers such as Socrates, Ramanuja and Lao Tzu, and in all three geographical cases a very rich, diverse, and sophisticated philosophical tradition develops. It is the great boon of contemporary philosophy that these very different philosophical traditions are increasingly coming into conversation with each other. The challange for the student of Philosophy is to enter into conversation with the great thinkers of history, and standing on their shoulders, to philosophize along with them in our meager way, to have our own horizons expanded by having the best of dialogue partners, and perhaps in our own beginning way to see further than we would have without them. Consider this an invitation to enter into the 'conversation' of philosophy, the dance of learning to 'do' philosophy , be patient in learning the steps. With regards..... Mr. B.
© 1997 blaine.barclay@sympatico.ca
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