[lit-ideas] Suggestions for class I'm teaching????

A bit of help please.
I'm supposed to teach three philosophy classes next Spring for "Semester at Sea." I know what I want to do, and I've taught parts of the classes before, but I'd really like to make one of the classes better. Here's the course description that I have so far: 


"The Bridge in the Jungle: Judging Other Cultures"
The writer B. Traven said about travel "One becomes a philosopher by living among people who are not of his own race and who speak a different language. . . . A trip to a central American jungle to watch how Indians behave near a bridge won’t make you see either the jungle or the bridge or Indians if you believe that the civilization you were born into is the only one that counts. Go, and look around, with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong." But ultimately the point of international travel is to "learn" something, to be able to make more informed judgments and wiser decisions about the world. This assumes that there are "better" ways to think about other cultures, "better" ways to judge them. How do we make "better" judgements about cultures rather than just express our own prejudices? How do we put our historical and sociological and political knowledge to use in making informed judgements? It’s the traditional role of philosophy to examine the process of making moral judgements and knowledge claims, so we will put philosophy to work in helping us see cultures in a way that is both open to differences and still able to make judgments about them. We will use several classical and contemporary philosophical perspectives to examine this question, as well as try to put those perspectives to use in recording and reflecting on our observations of various cultures.
Since there are so many different perspectives here, politically, academically, and personally, I thought I'd throw this out to see what kinds of ideas people came up with. 


------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: