What's your philosophy?

It's Day One in Intro to Philosophy. We'll begin each day with a question (or two) and a quiz, followed by discussion. For starters:

1. What is philosophy? What's your current understanding of the term, the discipline, the mindset? What's it good for?

2. What is your philosophy? Can you (like Sally Brown) put it in a word or phrase? Does your personal philosophy fit on a bumper sticker? Should it?

3. Do you have a favorite philosopher, philosophical book/film/show/musician? Who? Why? Can pop culture be philosophical?

4. Who are you? What are your goals, in this course, in school, and in life? What matters most to you?

5. Socrates said we should question everything and everyone: "the unexamined life is not worth living," "know thyself"... How do you feel about that? Are you prepared to do it?

You can post your answers here, STUDENTS, and comment on others' responses as well. Be civil, and remember that this is an open Internet forum. Non-students are welcome to participate too.

More winter reading

For Intro students eager to get a jump-start on the readings, here are our main texts for Winter-Spring 2010:

*Solomon & Higgins, A Passion for Wisdom: A Very Brief History of Philosophy

*Richardson, William James: in the Maelstrom of American Modernism

*de Botton, Consolations of Philosophy

*Critchley, Book of Dead Philosophers

Everyone will also be encouraged to find a volume of popular philosophy that speaks peculiarly to an interest of their own, and either write or do a class presentation about it. (Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy, anyone?)

If the Critchley title sounds too morbid, I promise you it is not. Mortality was never so much fun, in fact. Here is the author, surveying a very brief history of how Big Questioners have shuffled off our humble coil. (Best exit line, seasonally appropriate just now, was from Wittgenstein: "Tell them it was a wonderful life.")