F21 Philosophy

Wednesday/Thursday

Part 1: Small group discussion

1. Get together with the small group you discussed with on the first day.

2. Go around your group and share out your thoughts and questions about the videos from last night, specifically: If much of your knowledge about the world is based on testimony, how reliable is your knowledge? Do you agree that you have an epistemic responsibility to reject ideas you don’t have evidence for?

Part 2: Reading and Discussion Form

1. You will receive a Discussion Form for the reading assignment, “Conspiracy Theories”. There is a prereading question. Answer this BEFORE you read the article. While reading the article, practice some of the note taking strategies you discussed with your team, including marking up the text (annotating). You will be basing your discussion tomorrow on this reading, so it is important that you read it closely and carefully. What you do not finish in class is your homework for Friday.

Part 3: Textbooks

You will be going to get the textbook for this class, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. For now you should take it home and leave it there until told otherwise.

Access

Please review this Slide Deck on technology. By the end of Access on Thursday you should be able to log in to Schoology and should familiarize yourself with it.

If you have WiFi issues, check out this DOC

Philosophy Tuesday Activities

1. On a piece of paper or a Doc, please take 5 minutes to respond to the following prompt. Please use complete sentences, and remember that a good, analytical, precise sentence is better than a mediocre, rambling, imprecise paragraph.

Prompt: "How do you know that what you think you know about COVID-19 is true? If you don’t believe the conspiracy theories (5G, China, Fauci, Bill Gates, etc.), how do you know they aren’t true? If you do believe these theories, how do you know the explanations of the global medical experts aren’t true?"

2. Once both you and your partner (the person sitting in the row next to you, or a triplet if necessary) have both completed writing, turn and talk. First, introduce yourselves (names, pronouns, Instagram handle, blood type, etc.) and share why you chose to take this class. Second, have the partner with the birthday closest to today start by reading, word for word, their response to the prompt. While they are reading, the other partner should jot down the most important ideas and examples given (on their paper or Doc). Then switch and have the other read and take notes. Once both partners have read their response, discuss what you wrote and write a note on what is the most important similarity and most important difference in your responses.

3. Turn to the closest other pair and introduce yourselves, and share your agreement and disagreements with each other, making sure to take notes on what was discussed.

Homework for next class

You are going to be watching a couple of Crash Course Philosophy videos through EdPuzzle which will have questions that go along with the video. These videos are on “epistemology,” which is the branch of philosophy associated with how we know things, what counts as knowledge, and how we can try to tell truth from untruth.

For EdPuzzle, please use the following link to create your account and join this class-- https://edpuzzle.com/open/vaojeni

(Create a nickname and join the open class)

There are 2 videos assigned, one on how philosophers understand the idea of "knowledge" and the other on something called "epistemic responsibility." Each video is about 10 minutes long, but there are a few questions to check for understanding along the way (nothing too complicated). Please be sure to have completed both videos by the start of the next class session so that you are well prepared for the discussion and reading we will be doing.

[If, for some reason EdPuzzle doesn't work, here are links to the Crash Course videos on YouTube. There won't be questions to help guide you, but it'll be better than nothing. Knowledge Epistemic Responsibility]