PHILOSOPHER/THINKER REPORT

Revised January 11, 2002

Activity: presentation, 5-6 minutes in length, about a selected thinker. The presentation will be given at an appropriate point in the course. A typed or word processed version of the presentation should be turned in to the instructor after the presentation. At presentation time, you're the teacher: make your report intelligible to your classmates! (You may use visual aids if you wish.)

Grading: Credit for this report can be used in place of a large (about 20-point) essay on the final exam, or used in place of a 20-point essay on which you scored low in any 100-point test or exam prior to the final exam, or pro-rated for up to 15 points in one such test or exam on which you scored low in the non-essay sections.

Contents of the Report

Answer as many of the following questions as you can. I do not expect you to answer all of them, but spend at least a third of your time on number 4.

1. When did the thinker live? To what ethnic, national, or cultural group did the person belong? What religion, if any, did the thinker accept? Did the person travel widely during his lifetime?

2. What religious, economic, social, or political events influenced the thinker's intellectual interests, ideas, problems?

3. What intellectual (scientific, cultural, religious, earlier philosophical) influences affected the person's thinking?

4. KEY IDEAS what philosophical or intellectual problems interested the person, and what are the main ideas in the person's religious, scientific, or philosophical thought?

For thinkers in the area of social philosophy (S), what are the person's main ideas about justice, rights, human well-being, political obligation, liberation from oppression, etc. (Note, most philosophers who work in this area also have views in philosophy of human nature

For thinkers who weigh in on philosophy of human nature (HN), what are the person's main ideas about human nature, the self, the purpose of life, reason, knowledge, reality, happiness, human relation to the divine.

For thinkers in the area of epistemology (E), what are the person's views on the nature of knowledge, the sources of knowledge, the reliability of sense perception, the possibility of a priori knowledge, the active or passive nature of the mind, the extent or limits of knowledge, what makes a claim a scientific or a scientifically acceptable one, etc.

5. To what important later philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, etc. events or movements did the person's thought contribute? You may include, but are not limited to, consequences of the person's thought that are effective now, in the present.

6. For persons now long deceased, what would the person say about some hot topic today that could be compared to issues the person dealt with in his or her lifetime?

John Rawls (S)
J. S. Mill (S, E)
Robert Nozick (S}
Plato (S, HN, E)
Aristotle (S, HN)
Thomas Aquinas (HN)
Charles Darwin (HN)
Jean-Paul Sartre (HN)
Rene Descartes (HN, E)
Thomas Hobbes (S, HN)
Baruch Spinoza (HN)
John Locke (S, HN, E)
David Hume (HN, E,S)
B. F. Skinner (HN)
John Searle (HN)
Sigmund Freud (HN)
Friedrich Nietzsche (HN)
Simone De Beauvoir (HN)
Immanuel Kant (HN, E)
Karl Popper (E)
Thomas Kuhn (E)

A brief topical presentation on debates or problems we won't be studying collectively may also be possible (see me separately about this). Philosophy-of-art issues, for instance, could be discussed this way.