Scooby-Dubito

The parallels between Descartes and Scooby-Doo are uncanny...

As Descartes writes in his Meditations on First Philosophy:

I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusion of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any falsehoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree.

That's right. Descartes, having realized that everything he believed he knew to be true was subject to doubt, decided that he could only achieve certainty if he could overcome any possible doubt, even the doubt that God was in fact an Evil Demon.

While on the surface it would appear that it is Descartes' proofs of God's existence that enable him to defeat the Evil Demon, much like in Scooby-Doo, looks can be deceiving. Just as "Reason" is what gets Descartes into his doubt spiral, it is also "Reason" that gets Descartes out of it.

What Descartes proves in his Meditations is that his well-known "Cogito" is not just the only thing of which he can be certain, but that it has the power to both push us to the brink of insanity ("Everything is a lie created by an Evil Demon!") and can bring us back to sanity once more ("Everything is a truth created by a benevolent God!").

The surface of Descartes' argument: I had doubt, but God created me, and I can prove it, thus there is certainty.

The underbelly of Descartes' argument: I had doubt, but I created proofs that God exists, thus there is certainty.

In other words, the Evil Demon is Descartes. God is Descartes. And, as Husserl would argue in his own Cartesian Meditations, we are all Descartes.

Characters in Search of God: Crises of Faith in Vikings, The Americans, and Hannibal

Vikings

The Americans

Hannibal

Most of the ostensibly religious practices shown on television have no intended religious meaning to them whatsoever. This is evident in the fact that whatever practice being portrayed in one episode (even if the practice in question is a funeral) almost never has any bearing on the characters in the next episode. Perhaps then it was only with the rise of serialized television and season-long story arcs that the portrayal of religious practices could actually involve religious meaning. In other words, religion cannot have any weight in a world with a reset button.

To watch television more recently is to see a decidedly different portrayal of religion. Now, if a character is to be found in a church, it's not merely because it's a setting common to American life, but because the character is having a crisis of faith. Indeed, more and more today television shows are becoming centred around characters experiencing spiritual crises.

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Does the Introductory Philosophy Course Cover Too Much?

Typical philosophy course chalkboard from the University of Chicago

In his blogpost Does the Introductory Physics Course Cover Too Much?, Rhett Allain writes:

The point is that even with the very first concept in introductory physics, there are many things that students must not only understand but master in order to progress. Learning physics isn’t like building a pyramid with introductory concepts at the bottom. No. Learning physics is like an upside down pyramid that gets bigger at the top. All of this mass at the top of the pyramid is being supported by these initial ideas. A small crack in these supporting ideas will bring down the whole thing.

As Allain explains, though he organizes his Intro course around three basic principles (momentum, work energy, and angular momentum), students can only learn these principles if they have already learned what these principles presuppose (vectors, rates of change, how to graph). In other words, the "basics" are not as basic as we professors tend to take for granted, and by taking the "basics" for granted we risk leaving students behind.

Allain therefore suggests that Intro to Physics be reorganized from the bottom up (rather than from the top down, such as by the demands of the other departments whose students are required to take Intro to Physics). This bottom-up approach begins by asking the seemingly most basic question—"why are students taking this course?"—and ends with the sober conclusion:

Alas, if this was a 3 credit hour course you probably wouldn’t get to torque. I think torque is cool, but it’s a stretch to do all the cool things in such a short time.

After reading Allain's blogpost, and after having recently reviewed my student evaluations from last semester, I'm now led to wonder about the three parallel concerns surrounding teaching Intro to Philosophy:

1. What are the "basics" of Intro to Philosophy?
2. What are the basics behind these "basics"?
3. What is the "torque" or "cool thing" we should be willing to drop from Intro?

I would be fascinated (and greatly helped as a philosophy professor) to see how other philosophy professors answer these questions (and in particular how different the responses might be say from analytic and continental philosophy professors). 

Of course for philosophy, unlike physics, these questions are internal rather than external to philosophy (in other words, the question of how to teach philosophy is itself philosophy), for which reason our "upside down pyramid" might look a little different from that of physics.

Physics aims in one direction. Philosophy however is more "Ouroborical"...

Were I to attempt to answer these three questions, it might go something like this:

1. Epistemology; Ethics; Aesthetics.
2. Logic; Critical thinking; Writing.
3. Non-traditional/canonical/Western philosophy.

Such answers of course, Ouroborically, raise new questions:

1. Can one learn logic, critical thinking, and even writing without first learning epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics?
2. What is the value of learning epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics if we are not also learning non-traditional/canonical/Western philosophy?
3. If we were to learn non-traditional/canonical/Western philosophy, what impact would that have on both epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics on the one hand, and on logic, critical thinking, and writing on the other?

As you can see, I am now down the rabbit hole of philosophy, a rabbit hole I have been down many times before, for which reason I would greatly appreciate feedback from any other philosophy professors out there.