This course stresses the development of critical tools for the analysis and evaluation of arguments. Practical applications will make up a large part of the course work. These techniques will enable us to examine arguments in ordinary language with a better eye for the detection of weaknesses. Frequent short quizzes and a comprehensive final examination. The student is introduced to the basic features of symbolic logic and to some aspects of informal logic.
Attention is given to the practical importance of improving one's reasoning abilities.
A survey of influential medieval thinkers, including Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Ockham, Nicholas of Cusa and others. Hannah Arendt claims that the unprecedented fact of totalitarianism has broken the history and tradition of the West. In this course we will undertake a careful reading of Arendt's major text, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in an effort to understand how the accomplishments and the shortcomings of this broken tradition pave the way for the radically novel structures which totalitarianism brings into the world. Among the questions Arendt's text will force us to confront are racism, bureaucracy, imperialism, and, of course, totalitarianism. We will supplement her work with a few readings from Primo Levi and Herbert Marcuse.