Comment by bsder
19 days ago
> Having to take notes because they are not provided, rather than getting value from a lecture due to interactive participation sounds like a waste of time. This sounds exactly like the type of lecture I would have skipped.
Erm, a philosophy "lecture" is generally more like a discussion session. The value isn't in the "lecture notes"; the value is in the discussion going around the room.
The goal is to personally develop an informed opinion on nebulous concepts.
In the best ones, your opinion is in opposition, and you have to argue that yours is correct. And you have to examine your axioms to see which ones you disagree on. You read authors like Socrates and Aristotle not to be memorized as authoritative, but to understand where their arguments were strong and, more importantly, where they were faulty.
The primary value is in exercising your mind. You can't do that for "discussion" classes unless you attend the lectures.
Although, every student having 4+ missed classes (he said 2 weeks not 2 lectures) for a discussion-based subject really is kind of unreasonable.
Side note: Being an engineer in a class with philosophy majors was fascinating--the sheer amount of misunderstanding about basic science (let alone quantum mechanics) was staggering. It also opens your eyes about what you can and cannot take for granted.
I vaguely remember the philosophy classes I took oncr upon a time as all being lectures and then extensive papers for homework, with real discussion only happening in the 400-level ones around when I finally stopped taking them because the endless paper-writing rhetoric in circles was just terminally boring by that point.
That sounds like an abysmal philosophy education. Sorry you got that. The main purpose of a philosophy class is to read some material, engage with it critically in a guided dialogue in class time, and engage critically by yourself with it in written work. Straight lectures are basically going to wind up just being cliff's notes for a written source and are about as useful as any secondary source. The exception would be survey courses and intro ones, where the professor's choice of how to guide students through material can make an overwhelming task of exposing yourself to a lot of different thought into something manageable.