DFPY Courses

Here's the standing schecule for philosophy courses at USAFA. Note the Phil 495 course is a special topics course/seminar and will cover different subjects. Also, a Phil 499 can be developed in conjunction with DFPY faculty to broaden and extend studies in any given area.

"A Little Philosophy Is A Dangerous Thing"

“Philosophy,” according to Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, in their new book The Grand Design, “is dead.” It has “not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, [and] scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

A philosopher (living, as far as we can tell) responds here.

How We Do Philosophy

Excerpt from "The Philosophical Novel" by James Ryerson (NYT):

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose latest novel is “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” treats philosophical questions with unabashed directness in her fiction, often featuring debates or dialogues among characters who are themselves philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. Still, she says that part of her empathizes with (Iris) Murdoch’s wish to keep the loose subjectivity of the novel at a safe remove from the philosopher’s search for hard truth. It’s a “huge source of inner conflict,” she told me. “I come from a hard-core analytic background: philosophy of science, mathematical logic. I believe in the ideal of objectivity.” But she has become convinced over the years of what you might call the psychology of philosophy: that how we tackle intellectual problems depends critically on who we are as individuals, and is as much a function of temperament as cognition. Embedding a philosophical debate in richly imagined human stories conveys a key aspect of intellectual life. You don’t just understand a conceptual problem, she says: “You feel the problem.”

Read the article here.

Recap: Lessons 1-4

We started with basic terms, Philosophy, Ethics and Morality, and we made a distinction between Ethics and Morality for the purpose of this course. Remember, most people use the terms Ethics and Morality interchangeably (though they wouldn’t say something like “business morality” or “the ethic of the story”). We make the distinction here because (1) the words have seperate roots and origins, and (2) when we look at the etymology, we find that ancient difference informs an important feature of your relationship to the Academy.

It goes something like this: You come here with an established set of morals. The job here at the Academy is to present to you our military ethic. Your job then is (1) to decide whether you want to be a part of the military, and (2) to adopt the military ethos. We all operate under the assumption that the answer to (1) is “yes,” so the real work is going on with (2). Adopting the military ethos is a process, not something you do overnight. Throughout that process, we, the faculty, staff and personnel at the Academy, work to reinforce your decision in various ways. Ultimately, we’re working to persuade you to adopt our ethos. That may sound strange at first, but much of human communication and interaction amounts to little more than some function of persuasion. In class I said philosophers have two main tasks; to analyze and to persuade. The same could be said for any academic field. Science, for instance, does the majority of its business behind the scenes, with scientists working to persuade one another about what constitutes evidence. In the Air Force, our “official” (i.e., the one we learn in PME) definition of leadership is “the art and science of influencing and directing people to accomplish the assigned mission.” Sometimes the best way to persuade someone is to have them persuade themselves, so your fist assignment for the course, reading George F. Will’s lecture and answering the two questions, was designed to have you reflect on your own process of internalizing the military ethos up to this point.

We talked in class about how persuasion moves one to adopt a belief or position or course of action and how it’s based on argument. We looked at the construction of arguments and the different types, how our experience of the world is matured through argument, and how we judge good arguments from the bad ones, which is the critical step in developing our knowledge. On that last point, the Harry Frankfurt reading took us beyond fallacies with his work on BS. We read him as an exemplar of how philosophers do their work. His examinations of lying and intent are also applicable to your experience with the Honor Code here at the Academy. Your second assignment will explore that further and consider whether Frankfurt might offer some enhancement to the Code and its application.

Finally, we applied some tools of the trade to a case study by taking a critical look at the justifications for going to war in Iraq and identifying the bad arguments, i.e., those that failed to persuade.

Reading Philosophy

We require you to conduct close readings of important, primary source texts on ethics and morality. We call them primary sources because they’re written by major philosophers of the Western tradition. The point is to put you in direct contact with these thinkers so that you form your own experience.

Since, for many of you, this will be your first experience with philosophical writing, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Struggle but don’t fight – the readings are the content of the course; not my lectures. If you don’t read, you won’t learn. Nor will you learn if you rely on the opinions of other people, even if they happen to be correct. We want you to develop intellectual independence; not be daunted by new subjects or by authors who are smarter than you.

2. Slow down but don’t stop – give yourself enough time to get through each reading at least once. Engage the reading on a personal level. If you’re having trouble in a spot, take a note and bring it up in class, but don’t let it bog you down and don’t stop.

3. Be generous but don’t roll over – philosophical works are acts of persuasion. There’s an argument being made and most of the time it’s explicit and logical. That doesn’t mean you have to agree. In fact, if you’re actively reading, there should be several points where you disagree with the text. That’s good. Make notes.

The best analogy I can make here is with food: we’ve all had really amazing meals. Those are the primary sources. Secondary sources are like the frozen stuff; some of it may be nutritional, but it’s always better to get or make your meals fresh, even though it takes a little longer.

Core

Welcome to the excavation.

I won’t bore you with sunshiney reasons as to why you need/should/have to study philosophy. Candidly, many of you won’t see the value in wrestling with philosophical reflection. It’s not that you lack the aptitude. It’s more a matter of expectation management; what you think philosophy is all about versus what it actually does to a person. Done properly, philosophy exposes the limitations of human endeavors. It “teaches” us how little we know. That’s never an easy lesson for anyone to take, and accordingly, the history of philosophy is filled with the stories of men and women who suffered great humiliation, even death, because of their views. Most philosophers value independent thought over the comforts of groupthink, and for their trouble, many have been labeled as agitators, blasphemers, and traitors.

As a rule, the military doesn’t abide those kinds of people serving in our ranks, or at least not for very long. Nor, as individual military members, are we encouraged to allow doubt or skepticism to creep into our consciousness (or consciences) as both tend to hinder the performance of our mission. Therefore you, having been raised and trained here at USAFA to act decisively and confidently, may find your first experience with a formal philosophy course to be somewhat jarring.

So why exactly are you here?

The official reason has to do with the coherence of USAFA’s core curriculum, which is organized developmentally to promote learning and growth in the areas of (1) culture and global awareness, (2) leadership and human behavior, and (3) science and technology. Specifically, PHI 310, the core philosophy course, focuses on ethics, which USAFA cites as contributing to the culture and leadership areas.

Fair enough, but the study of philosophy also contributes to learning and understanding in the sciences as well. General science began to gel as a recognizable form of inquiry only after its questions passed through a period of philosophical reflection. That’s true of most other fields of study as well. As we’ll cover in class, philosophy – literally, the love (philo) of wisdom (sophia) – founded all of the academy. It is our core. Or, as Matthew Goldstein, CUNY Chancellor (and math/stats major) says: “If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”

That perspective gets closer to explaining why you’re here. Philosophy is concerned with human cognition, reason, and the faculties and tools we use to understand and engage the world. Our mind tools haven’t changed for quite a while. Despite boggling advancements in technology, science, etc., we still think, at a very basic level, very much the way humans thought thousands of years ago. We still think like humans. So as other disciplines have spun off and marked their own areas of inquiry and specialized study, dramatically changing our perspective on the world, philosophy has, for 2,500+ years, retained its central position as the broader search for knowledge at a basic, human level. It’s done this by embracing, challenging and reconnecting theories from the sciences, arts, math, religion, social studies and society in general.

How does it do this? How does philosophy work? Here are two broad examples: First, philosophy challenges basic assumptions, both those held by individuals as personal beliefs and those that serve as the foundation, the received truths, for a specific institution. Second, philosophy pushes knowledge and understanding to its theoretical limits, setting the groundwork for further development. These two operations define the boundaries of knowledge (and other disciplines) with something like a pull-push: check what you think you know and press that to its limits.

And that’s exactly what we hope to accomplish with you in this course. As officers, you’ll have to make decisions with incomplete and imprecise data. True success in those situations comes from acknowledging and understanding what you don’t know, and avoiding the natural tendency to BS your way through.

And, obviously, if that was the easier path to take, you wouldn’t be here.