Suggested Paper Topics, Contemporary Philosophy

You may use any of the topics below for critical analysis papers and take home essays in this course. Feel free to write your own topic, but check with me to be sure the topic is focused and practical for the assignment.

Unit 1:

1. Marshall Berman's introductory chapter to All that is Solid Melts in the Air attempts to give an assessment of the social reality of life in the twentieth century. Give an accurate and detail synopsis of his account and then critically assess it.
2. What are the main features of the "new cosmology" and how does it challenge our sense of our place in the universe.
3. In a personal experience essay, discuss the sense of certainty or uncertainty that you think life in the 20th century engenders. As much as possible, show the relationship or lack of relationship between your own experience of 20th century social reality and the accounts given by Berman and Marshall.

1. In a short essay (2-3 pages) try to explain what connection (if any) you find between you're own experience and the themes discussing in the Berman and/or Wheelis readings.
2. We began this course with a good deal of cultural history from philosophy, politics, social theory, and science regarding the defining characteristics of the 20th century.  But philosophers cannot agree on the extent to which the historical events of an era shape philosophical ideas.  In a brief speculative essay, consider some of the readings of the first unit and try to answer this question:  Does historical change shape philosophical ideas?  If so, what themes would you expect in twentieth century philosophy on the basis of the historical background you have read in Unit 1.

Unit 2:

1. Reconstruct and critically evaluate either Moore's refutation of idealism or his proof of realism.
2. Identify one or two of the criticism of Moore's realism discussed in Jones and provide a critical discussion in which you consider the seriousness of the criticism as well as some responses available to Moore.
3. Why does Wittgenstein's Tractatus conclude by relegating a large number of topics to the unsayable?  Is this conclusion warranted?
4. Reconstruct and critically assess Wittgenstein's theory of pictorial form.  Explain, in the course of your discussion, why it is anything more that the correspondence theory of truth.

1. In a general essay, evaluate the effort of early 20th century analytic philosophers to defend realism. Do not take on the burden of evaluate Moore, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle in sequence, but assess their project in light of a general characterization of their approach. (4-5 pages)

Unit 3:

1. Phenomenology presents a radical alternative to analytic method in philosophy.  Give a general critical assessment of each tradition's method and the value of each for thinking philosophically.
2. Reconstruct Heidegger's analysis of what's wrong with the way people think about Being, and explain his remedy to this problem in the phenomenology of Dasein.  Critically evaluate his approach.
3. Reconstruct the main philosophical committments of existential philosophy, using Sartre's existential to fill out the general picture.  Then give an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of existential thought as an approach to leading a good life.

Unit 4:  Wittgenstein (Later Analytic)

1. Explicate and give a general critical assessment of Wittgenstein's use of "language game" analysis.
2. Select a particular philosophical problem, such as the mind-body problem or the problem of universals, which Wittgenstein's language game analysis allegedly "dissolves" and reconstruct and evaluate his analysis of that problem.
3. Reconstruct and evaluate Wittgenstein's treatment of certainty in On Certainty.
4. Choose a specific set of remarks from On Certainty on a particular theme or issue and reconstruct and evaluate Wittgenstein's "solution" or treatment of that theme.

Unit 5:

1. Discuss the similarities and differences between postmodern philosophical thought in its nearest kin -- existentialism and Kantian philosophy.  Then critical evaluate its strenghths and weaknesses in relation to the movement from which it grew.
2. Compare and constrast, then critically evaluate, the approach to language taken in Wittgenstein's "language game analysis" and Derrida's "deconstruction".
3. What is deconstruction?  What value, if any, does it have as a philosophical strategy?
4. What is knowledge in the postmodern era, according to Lyotard?
5. Reconstruct and critically evaluate Rorty's conception of the problem of the self in postmodernism.