Reading: A Peek Ahead

A peek ahead

What are we going to study and in what order?

As we move our way through the various weeks, I will be assigning activities that will assist you in coming to grips with some of what we are doing. There will be several quizzes which will help you to discern if you are making progress in understanding the material. The quiz results are what we use to determine if you have passed the course.

As an added “treat” we will be reading a couple of pages each week from a recently retired Christian philosopher named Alvin Plantinga as he gives “Advice to Christian Philosophers.”  This will give us an opportunity to read a full philosophical work by a gifted thinker. Much of the rest of our reading will simply be excerpts from much larger works. So this will be a unique opportunity to see how a philosopher thinks and works his way through various arguments.

In the weeks to come, these are the topics we will be addressing:

Week 2:  A. Logic and arguments: here we will be introducing the topic of arguments. In philosophy everything needs to take the shape of an argument. That means, it has to be logical. Many times when we use the term arguments, we are referring to a sharp disagreement between two or more people. But here it is referring to its use in philosophical discourse. One must have more than a response of, “I guess that is what I mean” when someone asks about a position one has taken.  The philosophical argument is based on the idea that one can state a thought and then demonstrate with various methods of support, why one has arrived at the thought.

               B. How to write a philosophy essay: here you will have an opportunity to work your way through a power point presentation that gives many very useful pointers concerning how an essay in philosophy might look.  One important aspect is proper attribution of our sources. Philosophical writing takes place in a broad community of scholars (that includes you!!) and we need to learn how to give proper credit for their thoughts that have challenged our thoughts, refined our thoughts, or affirmed our thoughts.

      C. We will work our way through a chart of the most common fallacies – that is, statements that when we look more closely might sound good, but are simply not true. These are often used in our everyday discussions to influence others to think the way we do. But they are examples of how the great Liar can make things sound like he is speaking as an angel of light. (See II Corinthians 11:  …

13For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. 14No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.15Therefore it is not surprising if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their deeds.)

We, I hope, have no intention of deciding to fight darkness with darkness. So we are called, I believe, to learn to speak the truth with love so that others may come to know the truth of God as we speak.

    D. Then we will take a little time to listen to a great Christian philosopher, CS Lewis, as he makes some pithy statements that are worth thinking over.  My intent in that lecture will be to give a window into the mind of a man who knew how to think clearly and logically.  In my opinion, you just might find some statements that are worth writing down and letting them percolate through your thinking as we study philosophy together.

Week 3 Ancient Philosophers:

The first thing we will do is to learn about a few of the really, really old Greeks. These are the early philosophers of the world. It was ancient Greece that first developed teachers who spent their days thinking about how the world works and how humanity fits into it.  Much of their teaching remains as a seed for our own thinking about life and the world in which we live.

The second part of week three introduces us to the two great philosophers of the ancient Greek world: Plato and Aristotle. We will only touch on a little bit of their work since it is easily worth an entire course just to scratch the surface of either of them.

Finally in week 3 we will be taking a short look at how the art of the ancient Greeks which has descended to us today still speaks of their philosophical convictions.

Week four gets us into an area of philosophical thinking rather than an historical era. We jump into the field of ontology as it is called as we ask ourselves, “What is real?” What makes a thing a thing? Is an idea real? Is a flower real? How do we know what the difference is? We will be listening to the teaching of Aristotle which seems to influence so much of what is involved in ontological thought today.

We will then turn to the teaching of a man named George Berkeley. One of his teachings can be finalized into this sentence, “Thus a material thing such as an apple consists of a collection of ideas (shape, color, taste, physical properties, etc.) which are caused in the spirits of humans by the spirit of God.” Berkeley’s ontology says that God is the One who causes the ideas of various material things to resonate in our minds and at that point we call it such and such.

The third part of the week is focused on attempting to understand something of the ontology of Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Week 5 Does God Exist?

As we get into week five, we take up one of the great questions of all time, Does God exist? The goal of the week is to have read and comprehended something of the many differing thoughts on how we know God is real.

We will begin with a consideration of the Ontological argument presented by St. Anselm about 1000 years ago. You will notice that here we are considering arguments – just the sort of thing we did in week two. This is a working out of how arguments work and how they continue to have effects over many years and differing generations.

In the second section of week two we will read the work of a contemporary Christian philosopher named Peter Kreeft. He works his way through many different arguments for the existence of God. We will be reading his material on just a few of them.

The third major reading for week three is an interview published in the New York times in which the author asks Alvin Plantinga to make the case for the existence of God in his philosophical perspective.

Week 6 addresses the area of philosophy we call epistemology. Here the basic question is how do we know something. For example, what does it mean to say “I know Jeremy. He is my friend.” What do we mean to say when we assert that we know something or someone? How reliable is that knowing?

The beginning of the material for his week is focused on some interesting material from the web on the subject of knowing. Then we move to the philosophy of Rene Descartes because his understanding of epistemology is thought of as the basis for much of modern philosophical thought.  The third entry on the materials sheet has to do with how Christianity and Science interact. It is written by John Suppe who is a professor at Princeton University. His insights will be a valuable window into how today’s scientists look at the issue of epistemology.

Week 7 delves into the mysteries of what it means to be human. What differentiates us from the other creatures that inhabit our world with us? What does it take to qualify as human? Then we ask, “what is the difference between the soul and the spirit?” We will make use of an article by Wayne Jackson to investigate this issue. Our third article for week 8 makes use of a Jewish point of view to help us dig into the Old Testament Scriptural idea of the relationship of Body and Soul.

Week 8, by this time, you may be wondering how long this course is going to take? How long until I am finished? So, in order to make this all very relevant we will dig into the concept of time. What is time and how do we understand our place in time? We will use some videos, some thoughts from St Augustine who was the first philosopher to attempt to understand time, and an article from a contemporary Christian who gives us his idea of time.

In week 9 we turn our attention to a man who has been called the father of modern philosophy, Soren Kierkegaard. He was a Danish Christian philosopher whose works established him as a thinker that needed to be heard.  After listening to a couple of secular people attempting to understand Kierkegaard, we will hear from a wonderfully articulate Christian thinker as he explains his take on the philosophy of Kierkegaard.

When we reach week 10, your mind will be spinning, I’m sure! So we might as well ask the question that will be on all our minds by this point, “So what is my mind?” what is this thing that is bewildered by all these differing philosophical concepts? Is it my soul? Is it my heart? What is the mind of a human being?

Week 11, the penultimate week of our time together, digs into the question of ethics. Is there such a thing as what is known as a “universal ought”? Are there standards of right and wrong, good and evil that are consistent no matter where we are at in the world? Or are our morals and ethical standards simply a unique cultural expression of who we are in our various countries? I think you will find this to be intriguing.

Our final week will be devoted to an introduction to a significant Dutch philosopher of the late 20^th Century by the name of Herman Dooyeweerd. His thinking has played a significant role in developing the way Christian philosophers in the Calvinist tradition have approached the issues of our day.

That will conclude our time together as we skim the surface of all that philosophers have been working at over the past three thousand years. I know you will enjoy the ride!