Living Philosophy: The Movement of Philosophical Thought and How It Affects Your Life
Taught by Ryan Doto
Ryan Doto is a host of things, including an obsessive learner, an omnivorous reader, a technophile, and an overall closet nerd. His professions include philosophy PhD student, professional Starcraft II player, and creator of two daily podcasts. If he could merge a book and a computer (and not the way the Nook or Kindle have), he would never, ever go outside.
This course is a brief look at the wonderful, complex, and often confusing world of philosophy. It unapologetically skips over huge parts of the "canon" and makes no effort whatsoever to touch on everything that has happened in terms of philosophical thought.
Instead, it will be a focus on the macroscopic ideas, trends, and movements of philosophy over time. It will beg you to stop thinking about philosophy as an old and stuffy way of over-thinking the world, and as philosophers as men with white beards in ivory towers mulling on and on about nothing. In fact, ideally this class will be just the opposite.
Beginning with a look at philosophy as a living thing, a movement of thought that has progressed in an interconnected way from the Pre-Socratics (really, really old and dead people) to the Post-Modernists (current philosophers), we will discover that this body of thought is more than just a club of elitist thinkers.
We will try to understand how this body of thought is, in fact, the same body of thought that has shaped our societies, our beliefs, and our understanding of very basic things in reality. In other words, in many ways, how we are examples of living philosophy (both metaphorically and literally).
This class is very friendly to non-philosophers, and requires no previous knowledge of philosophy whatsoever. It will be a class free of name-dropping and unexplained, complex ideas. Instead, it will strive to show you how even the most simple concepts in philosophy have had major impacts on your life, and will give real, modern examples of how it has done so.
So, if you have any interest in philosophy, serious thinking, or how philosophy might be more interesting or relevant to your life than you think, this class is going to be fantastic. My goal is to open some skeptical minds to how fun philosophy can really be, how important it truly is, and how it takes place every day. That being said, I have a huge challenge on my hands, and I'm extremely excited to take it on!
