PHL-110-02/03

Introduction to Philosophy
MWF 1-1:50 PM and 2-2:50 PM

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Instructor: Dr. Noëlle Vahanian

Office: HUM 307A

Phone: X-6134

Office Hours: 11-12:30 MWF & by appointment.

Email: vahanian@lvc.edu

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Required Books:

• Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation With Jacques Derrida (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) (Paperback) by Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo.
• Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato, John M. Cooper (Editor), Grube G.M.A. (Translator).
• Discourse on Method and the Meditations by René Descartes, John Veitch (Translator).
• The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus, Justin O’Brien (Translator).

Additional Required Readings (Available Online):

• What Is Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant.
• Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre.
• The Second Sex: Introduction by Simone De Beauvoir.
• A Room of One’s Own: Chapter 3 by Virginia Woolf.
• Invisible Man: Prologue and Epilogue By Ralph Ellison

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Course Description: What is a Philosopher?

This course is an invitation to think, think, think... It is an invitation to think critically, to think responsibly, to think creatively, and to think differently than is required by most other courses. To these ends, it is an invitation to think both about what it means to be a philosopher and like a philosopher. How? By looking at how philosophers make the perennial questions of philosophy their own questions and by learning to understand and engage philosophic texts much in the same way that one learns to understand and converse in a foreign language: with patience and practice.