[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????
- From: Walter Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 11:36:50 -0230 (NDT)
Very hurriedly, as the eagle is landing.
1. Martha Nussbaum, *Educating humanity* Excellent account of how to
perpetuate liberal education in a multiculturally pluralist democracy.
(We had her here a few years back. Breathtaking.)
2. Chapter 5: Multicultural and religious diversity in *The ethics of
teaching,* Ken Strike & Jonas Soltis (Teacher's College Press, 2004). Nine
good reasons not to be a cultural relativist. (Students should also read
chapter 1 on the moral theories. No point talking culture from a
philosphical point of view if you ain't got no philosophy.)
Walter O
MUN
On Mon, 21 May 2007, John Wager wrote:
> 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.
>
>
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