PHIL 700.001 – Proto-Seminar in Philosophy

Instructors: Carla Merino-Rajme and Gillian Russell. This course meets T 1:00 – 3:30 p.m. in CW 208.

We will study and discuss a wide range of papers, drawn from many areas of philosophy and written in a variety of philosophical styles. The aim of the course is to help you to develop your professional skills such as the ability to read carefully, to reconstruct arguments, to present material in oral and written form, and to contribute productively to discussions. Each week, one or two students are assigned to introduce the text assigned and lead the class discussion. When there are two presenters in a single week, it is the responsibility of the two presenters to divide the material to be presented appropriately. Each student will be presenting three times. All the readings will be available electronically on Sakai.

You will be asked to write a short paper every week in which you are not assigned to present the material. The paper should be no more than two pages (double-spaced, 12-point font, 1-inch margins) and can discuss any aspect of the reading. Papers are due at the start of each class. Please turn in your paper by sending it as an email attachment to both of us –gillian_russell@unc.edu and cmerino@unc.edu. For the first six weeks, the papers should include only your PID numbers as identification, so that we can read your papers anonymously. For the second half of the semester, we will ask you to put your names on your papers, so we can more easily spot patterns in your writing that we might want to address.

Every week, please come to class ready to discuss the assigned papers. If you complete all of the assigned work on time, then you will receive a P+ for the course. There is no final exam or final term paper. There are individual meetings in the middle and end of the course to review progress.