PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT
Spring 2011
“THE HEMLOCK”
NEWSLETTER &
SPRING 2011 REGISTRATION
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Fall 2011 Courses are now available on MaineStreet
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE 2 - Declare a Major
Major Requirements
PAGE 3 – Major Requirements (Con’t)
Minor Requirements
Need Help in Philosophy?
PAGE 4 – Fall 2011 Consider
Philosophy Upper Level Courses
PAGE 5- “The Hemlock”
“Philosophy Valued at One Community College” by Margot Adler
Page 6&7-Faculty Update
Spring Lecture Series dates
Page 8-10 Know the Philosophy
Department Quiz
Page 10-12- Student Stories
Page 13- Quote Corner
Page 13&14- Philosophy Symposium Information and Film Series
Page 14&15- Know your Philosophers
Philosophy Department Faculty
47 Exeter St.
Portland Campus
CHAIR OF DEPARTMENT
George Caffentzis, 780-4332,
Brenda McGovern
Administrative Assistant
780-4258
Full-time:
Jeremiah Conway, x-4241
William Gavin, X4242,
Robert Louden, X-4248
Julien Murphy, 228-8266
Jason Read, 228-8266
Kathleen Wininger, X-4928
Part Time
Michael Allen
Silvia Federici
John Hines, Gorham History Dept.
Eric VonMagnus
Greetings Philosophy Department majors, minors and potential majors. We hope this newsletter will be a useful resource for you when choosing your courses for the 2011 spring semester. In this newsletter you will find: degree requirements for the major, a list of department members and their contact information, as well as a detailed list of our Fall 2011
course offerings. BE SURE TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOUR ADVISOR SO YOU CAN RECEIVE YOUR PIN AND REGISTER IN A TIMELY MANNER. As a reminder, course registration is done online through the University’s MaineStreet system. Check MaineStreet for your advisor’s name and your designated registration time.
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PROCESS ON DECLARING A MAJOR
Please call or email the Chair of the Department and make an appointment to discuss your path as a Philosophy Major and get the formal paper work in order.
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REGISTER EARLY!!
WE ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO REGISTER FOR FALL SEMESTER COURSES IN A TIMELY MANNER TO ENSURE THAT COURSES ARE NOT CANCELLED FOR LACK OF ENROLLMENT!
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH YOUR ACADEMIC ADVISOR SOON!!!
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The Philosophy Department is located on 47 Exeter St. Brenda McGovern our departmental Administrative Assistant is always willing to assist students. She can be reached at 780-4258 or, by email: .
If you have any questions about the major or minor, please contact Department Chair
George Caffentzis, 780-4332,
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USM Philosophy Department MAJOR/MINOR REQUIREMENTS
MAJOR REQUIREMENTS
Any introductory philosophy course is a prerequisite to all other courses in philosophy. The minimum number of credits (excluding PHI 100 level) required for the major is:
36 CREDITS
Required: PHI 310I – History of Ancient
Philosophy
Required: PHI 330I – History of Early
Modern Philosophy
Required: 2 of any of the following history of philosophy courses:
PHI 310I-History of Ancient Philosophy
PHI 312I-Women Philosophy From Africa
Diaspora,
PHI 315I-Eastern Philosophy
PHI 320I-History of Medieval Philosophy
PHI 340I-History of Late Modern Philosophy
PHI 350I-American Philosophy
PHI 360I-Existentialism
PHI 370I-Analytic Philosophy
PHI 380I-Postmodernism
PHI 390I-Hermeneutics
Required: 7 upper level course electives (200’s, 300’s and 400 (level courses)
Required: PHI 400 Seminar in Philosophy or PHI 410 Senior Thesis**
** In the last year a Senior Thesis (PHI 410) is optional. The prerequisite for PHI 410 is a successful completion of PHI 400. This thesis consists of a major paper (minimum length: 50 pages) on a topic selected by the student and directed by one member of the Department. The student will meet with the mentor on a regular basis during the semester of the senior thesis. Honors status for graduation is granted if the student’s GPA in philosophy is at least 3.33 or higher upon completion of all requirements for the major.
Students enrolled in the HONORS Program can substitute their Honors senior thesis course for the seminar in philosophy/thesis requirement if a philosophy faculty member mentors the thesis.
Every major intending to pursue graduate study in philosophy is expected to take at least one language (German, French, Greek) through the intermediate level. German is preferred to French, although ideally both sets of courses should be taken. All majors are encouraged to take PHI 205, Symbolic Logic.
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MINOR REQUIREMENTS
The minimum number of credits (excluding PHI 100 level courses) required for the minor is:
15 CREDITS
Students who wish to pursue a Minor in Philosophy are required to take 5 courses beyond any PHI 100 level course.
Required: 2 courses in the history of philosophy:
PHI 310I-History of Ancient Philosophy
PHI 312I-Women Philosophy From Africa Diaspora,
PHI 315I-Eastern Philosophy
PHI 320I-History of Medieval Philosophy
PHI 340I-History of Late Modern Philosophy
PHI 350I-American Philosophy
PHI 360I-Existentialism
PHI 370I-Analytic Philosophy
PHI 380I-Postmodernism
PHI 390I-Hermeneutics
Required: 3 additional upper level course electives (200’s, 300’s, and 400 level)
NEED HELP IN PHILOSOPHY?
NEED HELP WITH FIGURING OUT HOW TO CONQUER YOUR PHILOSOPHICAL READING AND WRITING? DON’T UNDERSTAND YOUR COURSE ASSIGNMENT? PLEASE CALL YOUR ADVISOR FOR AN APPOINTMENT TO GET HELP OR CALL THE PHILOSOPHY DEPT. AND GET A MENTOR TO HELP YOUR OUT WITH DIFFICULT OR VAUGE ISSUES YOU HAVE WITH YOUR ASSIGNMENTS AND PAPERS IN PHILOSOPHY. PHONE NUMBERS AND EMAILS OF FACULTY & THE ADMINISTRAIVE ASSISTANT ARE ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THIS NEWSLETTER.
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A full explanation of the UNIVERSITY CORE REQUIREMENTS can be found online:
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Consider Philosophy
Fall 2011 Upper Level Courses
PHI 205: Symbolic Logic
Prof. George Caffentzis
M/W, 4:10 - 5:25 pm
All humans are rational.
All students of logic are rational.
Therefore, all students of logic are human.
Is this a valid argument? Can you explain your answer?
The main objective of the course is to give a formal backing to a student’s logical intuitions. Everyone who is now living has these intuitions, for without them one would be making disastrously bad judgments leading to immediate death. However, these logical intuitions are open to error. Formal logic gives us a way to understand the nature of these errors and a method to avoid them. This course can be helpful to all students, especially those who are involved in the creation and/or critique of arguments.
PHI 220 – Philosophy of Art
Prof. Kathleen Wininger
T - 4:10-6:40, TH – 4:10-6:40
What makes a person creative? What do artists think about their art? How do critics evaluate a work? If art is created for a cultural ritual or healing, is it to be understood differently? How do the circumstances of a work’s creation and reception effect its evaluation? How does a person’s class, ethnicity, or gender influence his/her artwork and its reception? Philosophers in the field of Aesthetics attempt to answer questions which artists, art historians, anthropologists, and critics ask about art. The works of art and philosophy considered will be drawn from a wide variety of cultural contexts.
PHI 340I: Late Modern Philosophy
Prof. Robert Louden
T/TH, 2:45-4:00
Late Modern Philosophy is an exploration of nineteenth-century European philosophy. Most of the leading European philosophers of this period were German, and many of them were reacting to the work of yet another highly influential German philosopher: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The Post-Kantian German philosophers to be studied in this first group include Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, and Nietzsche. But we will also examine some non-German nineteenth-century philosophy as well, e.g., Kierkegaard (Denmark), Comte (France), and Mill (England).
PHI 360I: Existentialism
Prof. Jeremiah Conway
M/W, 1:15-2:30pm
Existentialism is an effort on the part of certain 19th & 20th century thinkers to refocus philosophical attention on concrete issues of human existence – such as choice, faith, responsibility, anxiety, idle talk, and relationships. To these thinkers, philosophy is not just a matter of the intellect, but involves the imagination and emotions; philosophy must not let its theoretical interests detach themselves from the daily struggle to lead a more meaningful life. Philosophers studied include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and Heidegger.
PHI 400 Seminar: Sartre & Beauvoir
Prof. Julien Murphy
M/W – 8:30-9:45
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were a famous philosophical couple of the mid-twentieth century. In their forty-year friendship, they were the first readers of each other’s philosophical writings, political allies, personal confidants, and public intellectuals. We will study selections from Sartre’s existential writings including: Nausea, Being and Nothingness, No Exit, and the Critique of Dialectical Reason and from Beauvoir’s: The Second Sex, She Came to Stay, An Easy Death, and Coming of Age. Our objective is to assess the relevance of Sartre and Beauvoir’s existential phenomenology by the practice of detailed reading, writing and lively conversation.
“The Hemlock”
Newsletter Spring 2011
Philosophy Valued At One Community College
by MARGOT ADLER
January 4, 2011
As state universities cut back on humanities programs in order to deal with budget shortfalls, LaGuardia Community College in Queens, N.Y., is going in the opposite direction. At LaGuardia, philosophy is king: Of the 17,000 matriculated students, 4,500 are taking philosophy. There are seven full-time professors, most of whom have been added in the past two years.
The school, which has a well-regarded nursing school and programs in engineering and veterinary technology, is overturning the stereotype that four-year colleges are for intellectuals and community colleges are for career training.
"People tell methe role of community colleges is narrow — to train students for tomorrow's jobs, says Peter Katopes, the interim president of LaGuardia. "But I ask them, 'What are these jobs?' " The real task, he says, is training students for what he calls "the entrepreneurship of the imagination."
"It is giving studentsthe opportunity to really understand the context of their lives, and you do thatthrough the humanities," Katopes says. "If you do even a cursory survey of successful CEOs, you will know that an unbelievable number of them did their undergraduate degrees in English or philosophy or history."
Asking Questions
All kinds of students are taking philosophy at LaGuardia. Liz Montesclaros, 29, had been in the military before enrolling.
The military "is not the best place for questioning," Montesclaros says. "It's very rigid, very structured.When I finally got out, that's when I decided I really wanted toexplore the questions that matter to me: What are we doing here, why am I here in the first place, for what purpose?"
E.J. Lee, 22, started out as a business major.
"Growing up, my parents were 'make money, make money, make money,' so I figured business was what you do. But as a business major, I was required to take an ethics course, and as soon as I sat in that class, I knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," Lee says.
These are the kinds of attitudes you might find normal at a four-year liberal arts college. But the students here speak 120 different languages. And most of them were not born in the United States.
"We are all so different on the outside, and on the inside we are all searching, we are all seeking," says Gabriel Lockwood, who came to LaGuardia at36. He wandered throughEurope, knows a half-dozen languages, worked as a translator and took courses at various European universities, but he couldn't get credit for them in the United States. So at 36, he is starting again. He is full of questions, and philosophy, he says, has helped to answer some of them.
'The Heart Of Life'
The classes in philosophyare the usual: introduction to philosophy; ethics; religion and philosophy; political philosophy; logic; aesthetics; Eastern philosophy. But there are also new courses being developed in African philosophy and Latin philosophy.
John Chaffee, the chair of the department, says philosophy is a necessity, not a luxury.
"It's something that is at the heart of life.It addresses the foundational questions that we all wrestle with, and these are questions that [Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author] Viktor Frankl said 'burn under our fingernails,' " Chaffee says. "Philosophy is a discipline that gives us the tools to really understand ourselves, and the skills to answer the mysteries that are really at the heart of ourselves and at the heart of life."
Take a recent philosophy club meeting, where more than a dozen students and two professors sit in a circle and debate happiness.
The question: Suppose you lived a totally pleasurable life, but found out that you had been living in a virtual reality the whole time. You had really not done any of the things you thought you had, but you had all the experiences, all the pleasure, all the satisfaction, all the contentment. Would you say you were happy in those previous experiences?
"Even if this life is a dream, you can't take away the experience of that dream or what you thought you accomplished," student Arthur Rodriguez says.
Javier Velasco says it all depends on suffering. "If you had no suffering, you can'treally recognize happiness or appreciation for something if it is always there," he says.
Minerva Ahumada, who teaches introduction to philosophy and Eastern philosophy at LaGuardia, says these students bring very different things to the mix.
"It is more personal here. It is more challenging here, but also, the results you get are way more surprising than what I got at other kinds of institutions," Ahumada says.
Professor Richard Brown says many of the students here have serious real-life issues, but "to suddenly see them become curious about the nature of forms or universals or what is the morally right thing to do — it is really a privilege. These people never envisioned that they would be studying these kinds of things, and also understanding it and having it influence their life."
Five years ago, there wasn't even a philosophy major at LaGuardia. Now 60 students are majoring, and severalsay they want to teach it in the future.
The president of LaGuardia Community College made philosophy a priority, the department chair built a department and hired faculty. Now this community college in New York City that's under many people's radar has more philosophy majors than many four-yearcolleges and universities.It's like that line in the film Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come
What is Professor Murphy up to?
I chaired session of the Sartre Circle, AuthorMeets Critic: JosephCatalano’s book, Reading Sartre: An Invitation from Being and Nothingness to The Family Idiot, at the American PhilosophicalAssociation, Eastern Division Meetings in Boston.
I have been invited to review conference proposal presentations for thePerinatal Ethics Subcommittee, the Environmental Ethics subcommittee, the Research Ethics Subcommittee for the American Society forBioethics, and Humanities 2011 Meetings in Minneapolis.
I serve on the Maine Medical Center Research Institute’s Embryonic Stem
Cell Research Oversight Committee and on the MaineMedical Tissue Banking
Steering Committee.
For a second year, I am a member of the Medical School Admissions Committee for the Maine Track, for Tufts/MMC School ofMedicine.
Philosophy Department’s
Spring 2011 Lecture Series
Date: March 17, Thursday
Time: 11:45-1:00 pm
Place: Wishcamper, Rm. 133, Lecture Hall
Friendship & Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s “Lysis”
Prof. Jeremiah Conway
Hard as it is to believe, philosophy sometimes has the reputation of an esoteric, head-in the-clouds pursuit. Missing n this perception are the incredible resources that philosophy brings to bear on everyday issues, such as friendship.
This talk examines one Platonic dialogue that asks us to consider what we mean by friendship, why it is so important in our lives, how we encourage it, and how friendship is deepened. Perhaps as Plato suspected thinking about friendship may be necessary to become a better friend.
Date: March 30, Wednesday
Time: 1:00-2:30 pm
Place: PS 202
Professor’s Kathleen Wininger & Jonathan Cohen
A panel in celebration of the publication of Prof. Jonathan Cohen’s new book, “Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s ‘Human, All Too Human’ “
Professors Kathleen Wininger and Jonathan Cohen will speak on “Science, Culture, and Free Spirits: The Importance of Nietzsche’s Development for Understanding his Philosophy”
Date: April 14, Thursday
Time: 15-2:30 pm
Place: Wishcamper Ctr., Rm. 133
Prof. Julien Murphy
The Second Sex in Algeria: Simone de Beauvoir’s Defense of Djamila Boupacha
Near the end of the Algerian war, Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, demonstrated her commitment to the Algerian rebels by advocating for Djamila Boupacha. A young Algerian student and member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Boupacha was imprisoned for planting a bomb, which did not go off in the University restaurant in Algiers. She confessed under torture by French police in a French prison in El Biar notorious for torture tactics. Boupacha was spared execution largely due to the vigorous efforts of her defense attorney, Gisèle Halimi, who enlisted the help of Beauvoir in bringing international attention to the case. Beauvoir took a series of actions in defense of Boupacha including speaking out against the French government’s use of torture and lending her name to a book about Boupacha’s trial. This discussion of her involvement in the case will highlight a feminist critique of torture, the role of “The Second Sex” in the Algerian feminist movement and lessons from Algerian feminists for American feminist theory.
Know your Philosophy Professors Quiz:
Although none of us can narrow down one particular “favorite” artist that we enjoy, your beloved Professors shared some of the art and music that they find interesting. Can you figure out who said this?: (answers on last page of newsletter)
1)Favorite painting: Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window by Vermeer. Why? I have had a print of it on the wall of my study for twenty years. I still can't take my eyes off it. Brings a smile. It's like looking at wonder in color.
Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window
Music: Cat Stevens' Teaser and Firecat, sound track to the movie The Mission, Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Reason? It's the ability of the music to give voice to emotional states. The second movement of Mahler's Symphony is probably the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.