Philosophy for English Army Majors

Philosophy 101, Spring 2012, 4 credits. Professor Koeningsberg.
Authors include God, the Greeks, Dante, and World War II. Shotgun formation, man in motion, play action pass and quarterback sneak are among the options examined in the huddle. There is a final exam, eventually and inevitably The syllabus is divided in five parts:
-- Ethics: From Kant to cant. "The categorical imperative and six ways to make it work for you" (W. Allen, 1968).
-- Metaphysics: What was God doing on the day before he created the world? Does the heart have reasons of which reason is unaware? Is there an invisible presence like a spirit or a motion rolling through all things? The example of the insomniac dyslexic agnostic is studied along with the curious incident of the barking dog.in the night-time.
-- Aesthetics: "How does the nature of beauty differ from the beauty of nature?" (Collingwood)..The English translation is so baroque you're constantly checking the Greek or Latin on the facing page to make sure you're not dreaming. The "eternal feminine": fib, fiction, or fickle fabrication?
-- Epistemology: Why "I don't know" is the best answer to "How do we know what we know?" Did human nature change on a certain day in 1910 when Virginia Woolf said it did?
-- Politics. Competitive utopian thinking meets its match in a grand parade of dictators and world-beaters from Alexander and Napoleon to Hitler and Stalin. The inevitability of the "blame game." The difference between justice and poetic justice is subsumed in an appreciation of certain poems by Donald Justice, pictured above. And the incomparable Marilyn Monroe, below, playing the middle-aged man's Platonic blonde ideal in The Seven-Year Itch or singing "I'm Through with Love" in Some Like It Hot -- DL