Critical thinking is the best defense against intellectual trickery and self-delusion. It provides specific techniques and tools whereby we can avoid basic fallacies in our own thinking and detect them in the thought of others. Reasoning is a highly complicated human activity and cannot be satisfactorily studied in an intellectual vacuum. Hence, in this course, critical and uncritical thought are contrasted in the context of the world of human interests and activities, social, political and scientific. All of the basic tricks for persuading people to accept false premises and conclusions as true are systematically laid out and their detection practiced.
Students reflect consciously on the principles of thinking, speaking and writing.
This skills-oriented course reflects the assumption that we master skills more thoroughly when we are working on a set of issues that affect and change our daily lives. Critical assessment of human consciousness includes a variety of philosophical, psychological and anthropological data related to a discussion of what it means to be a human being. We consider classic and contemporary philosophical elaborations of each of these value perspectives on earth, attending to points where they are compatible and to points where they conflict. An introduction to the philosophical analysis of ethics, morality, and values, and a survey of the various systems of moral philosophy. This is a unique, innovative focus involving extensive use of a Web site for course exercises and projects including the use of email, listservs, chat rooms and research on the World Wide Web.