INTRO TO PHIL, fall 2017

I will be saving my white boards here for my students. From time to time, I will record by lectures. But I won’t be doing this everyday like I did in my summer Existentialism course.

Questions raised in morning class

Questions raised in afternoon class

Monday, 28 August 2017–Happy St. Augustine’s day!!!

Morning class white board

Words are powerful.

Let us work toward teaching ourselves how to be hospitable rather than merely tolerant.

Afternoon class white board

We follow our vocation to humanization by improving our critical thinking and rediscovering our playfulness.

Part of the “magic” of words is that something like a stereotype can function as “machine for dehumanization.”

Wednesday, 30 August 2017–Giroux and first definitions

Both classes were tasked with putting together a good etymology and definition for an assigned term. Morning got “Society” and afternoon took up “Wonder.” The classes will each have a google document that collects their questions over the course of the semester. [See above]

Morning class white board

Afternoon class white board

Wednesday, 06 Sep 2017–bell hooks and theory

No White board from my morning class. We did everything at the online Google Doc. But in the afternoon, the conversation turned toward the “theories” that organize our lives–that is, the “norms” that “normalize” our behavior. In that discussion, we were able to lay out what is taken as “normal” and how what does not fit those categories, even if it is never said out loud, automatically becomes “abnormal.” In this conversation, I attempted a gesture toward helping students understand the currently hot notion of intersectionality. Our main focus in hooks ‘Theory as a liberatory practice‘ was the notion that theory and theorizing can locate “a location for healing” (1) if we can struggle through the difficulty of naming our pain (11).  I was able to bring up the distinction that our particular pain was separate from the general set of privileges that might come to us based on where we fall into This allowed me, as well, to introduce Karl Jaspers’ notions of the limit situations–chance, suffering/pain, struggle, guilt, and death. Hopefully I will be able over the next few weeks to bring in Freire’s idea of limit acts. I have been seeding our conversations with the Freirean notion that our words for thinking about the world must encompass theory/practice or reflection/action in order to be true. 3256721636