Philosophy Classes That Should Be Added to the Curriculum for History Majors at Ohio State

There are three classes in the Philosophy department at Ohio State that I think would be good to add to the curriculum of the History degree. They are as follows:

1) Philosophy 250

This is a class on deductive logic, which teaches students to understand valid forms of argumentation in the form of sentential and predicate logic. While historical inquiry consists more in inductive and, a fortiori, abductive reasoning, it is still very important that students learn the principles of clear thinking in order to help them develop coherent arguments and avoid poor forms of reasoning.

2) Philosophy 660

This course is an advance study in epistemology, viz. the theory of knowledge. It is extremely important for historians to understand the epistemological foundations for why they can make claims to know and understand the past. Perhaps more importantly, they ought to be able to recognize their own epistemic limits. This course is more focused on epistemology in the abstract, but it provide students with an understanding of the issues involved that they can then apply to historical investigation.

3) Philosophy 455

The focus of this course is on the Philosophy of Science. While History is properly included in the Humanities department, there is a strong similarity to the types of reasoning done in History and in the sciences. Both analyze data and test hypotheses against the data, allowing for the formation of theories based on this analysis. At the risk of oversimplification, the real difference lies in the types of data that historians and scientists analyze. What will be gained in this class is an understanding of the issues involved in properly confirming an hypothesis, the limits of inductive reasoning, and the explanatory virtues used to evaluate competing theories.

Thomas J. Reese, S.J., "A World of Despair: This Catholic's View"

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/georgetown/2010/01/despair_and_compassion_fatigue.html

The above link is to an article by Jesuit priest Thomas J. Reese. The following quotation from it really struck me in a way that I was not expecting:

"An estimated 200,000 people have died. Thousands have been traumatically injured, and many of them will die of their injuries or disease. These people are not just statistics, they are men and women and children with faces and names and feelings." (italics mine)

Kevin J. Vanhoozer'z "Pilgrim's Digress: Christian Thinking on and about the Post/Modern Way" in -Christianity and the Postmodern Turn-

The following are some quotations in the above listed article that I found quite interesting.

"I recognize the importance of situatedness yet at the same time resist the notion that one's thinking can be explained merely in terms of the community to which one belongs. Such reductionism eventually leads to a social determinism that ultimately absolves individuals from personal responsibility for their thoughts (73)."

"How one reacts to the postmodern depends to a large extent on what one thinks it is: everything thus depends on the way one initially describes postmodernity (74)."

"Derrida's claim that "there is nothing outside the text" is not a silly claim about what there is in the world. He is not claiming that "to be is to be textually conceived" or that only writing exists. He is rather making the (bulveristic!) point that what we know about things is linguistically, which is to say culturally and socially constructed (78)."

"The peril of postmodernity is that losing the capacity to be informed and transformed by God's Word; the promise of postmodernity is that of rediscovering aspects of God's Word that enable us to get wisdom rather than mere information (ibid.)."

"As Cyrus released Israel from her Babylonian captivity and encouraged the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple, so postmodernity releases the church from its Athenian captivity to modernity and enables the return of certain exiled themes, religion and transcendence among them (80)."

"The danger in correlating theology with this or that philosophy (or any other discipline) is that of domesticating the divine, of reducing the strange new world of the Bible to this-worldly terms, of exchanging the scandal of the cross for the pottage of intellectual respectability (81-2)."

"Second, we need a variety of descriptions or vocabularies in order to highlight the different levels or aspects of reality. Such an aspectival realism has nothing to do with a perspectivalism that holds that what we see is constructed by our theories. No, the word is there, mind-independent and differentiated, yet indescribable apart from human constructions and only partially accessible to any single theory. The moderate realist insists that though our knowledge of the world is partial it can still be true: "we need a pluralism of vocabularies in order to give an adequate account of how matters stand" for the same reason that we need a plurality of maps (e.g., historical, topographical, geological, political) in order to navigate our way through the world (88)."

The last quotation, in particular, expresses why the language and vocabulary of contemporary analytic philosophy is incapable of adequately capturing the sum of human experience. Thus, we should look beyond the confines that analytic philosophy places on human knowing.