Letter to Parent(s), Relative, or Friend

Letter should be about 350-500 words more in length. Include all of this material so that you go beyond a mere summary of the course.

April, 1999
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807

Dear

My teacher in Introduction to Philosophy, Dr. O'Meara, has asked me to write this letter to you about the effect which the course has had on me. In the first lecture he challenged us, saying that although he knew that many of us in class had come to college so that we would get a good job, Philosophy 101 would be the course that we really came to college to take. For in this class we would explore with Socrates the examined way of life. We would raise basic questions about morality, human nature, knowledge, and religion. We would explore some of the famous answers in Western and Eastern thought, and we would find ourselves really thinking rather than just repeating to the teacher his own thoughts. To encourage our own thorough examination of life, the teacher assigned us a paper a week which we then discussed in small groups.

First, on the topic of morality, we discussed how Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant examined moral values. They agreed that a reflective examination of our moral existence would lead us away from believing that moral values are simply individually chosen or simply relative to one's culture or upbringing. A thorough examination would lead us towards the acceptance of a universal set of moral ideals for all humanity. The key principle that they agreed upon was that all human beings should be respected as persons and should not be treated as things that can be used and abused by others.

Aristotle argued that a careful analysis would find that acceptance of one's own basic value as a person and of all other human as persons with the same basic dignity was the key to true personal happiness and true relationships with other people through the virtues of justice, unselfish friendship, courage, temperance, and practical wisdom.
Mill argued that happiness was to be found in the qualitatively better pleasures in which it was better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied and better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. We may not be able to prove with argument, but deep in our feeling we know that it is better to be wise than a fool, better to be generous than selfish, better to be courageous than cowardly, and better to be educated than ignorant.
Kant argued that pure rationality without relying upon a concept of happiness would prove by absoluter argumentl two eually findamental formulations of the basic moral imperative. First, the moral imperative for all humans is that we should so act that the guideline of our action should be a universal law that any other rational being could follow, and second, the moral imperative is that we should so act as to treat every human person as a person and never only as a thing or mere means to our own ends. For every human person is an end in itself as both conscious of the self in our ratioanloity and as able to choose our self as a goal in our own actions.

Second, on the topic of human nature, we discussed B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, and Jean Paul Sartre on the question of whether our human behavior was determined by the conditions of our lives or whether we had real freedom of choice to affect and transform the conditions of our lives and even our very selves. We explored:

Skinner's theory of human behavior as controlled by conditioning,
Rogers' theory of human self-actualization and creativity as determined by the quality of one's significant relationships, and
Sartre's theory of the human being as self-creator, determined by one's own free choice of thinking and action.

Third, on the topic of knowledge and religion, we discussed the problem of suffering and whether we could understand why suffering excists if we were to assume that God, a good almighty Creator exists. Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, and David Hume, a great sceptic, raised the following problem:

If God is good, but not almighty, we can understand why suffering exists because although we know that God cares about creation, God simply would not have the power to stop evil.
If God is almighty, but not good, we can understand why suffering exists because although God has the power to stop suffering, God does not care to do so because God is not good.
However, if we accept the two attributes in question, that God is both good and almighty, how can we understand why suffering exists?

On this topic of ways of knowing and their applications to the problem of knowledge of God, we also explored:

Rationalism and the reasoned attempt to prove the existence of God by Thomas Aquinas who offered an argument for God as the First Cause, and Raymond Nogar, who examined an attempted proof of God as the Source of Order in our evolutionary world.
Empiricism and the sceptical approach of David Hume who argued against any supposed proof about God as the First Cause of the universe.
Pragmatism, first, in the thought of William James who attempted to prove that it was reasonable to choose to believe in God even though the evidence was incomplete, and second, in the thought of John Dewey who attempted to show God should be believed in as a practical symbol of our best human ideals, but not a separate Divine Reality. In connection with the pragmatists, we explored their understanding of religious experience and mystical experience and whether such experience was a practical proof of the Divine Reality.
Finally, in Existentialism, we discussed the approach of John Hick, who argued that there is a fundamental act of creative interpretation in all three realms of human experience: to some degree in perceptual knowledge, to a greater degree in moral knowledge, and to an even greater degree in religious knowledge.

All of these topics were to be written upon without relying upon any argument from authority such as an appeal to a set of sacred scriptures or traditional concepts which people have always held. Rather we were to examine all these topics by considering fundamental human experiences and reasoned argument. We were able to write responses in class to almost all the lectures and to discuss in our small groups both our weekly papers and our written answers to questions asked about the lectures that enabled us to draw upon our own experiences and reflections.

But let me tell you some details of the process and content of the course and how the course has affected my examination of life. . . .