Jon Short, PhD

e-mail: jshort@yorku.ca

office hours: Wednesday 5:30 – 6:30

Location: S401 Ross

This course aims to provide students with a grounding in critical thinking, argumentative skills, and the basics of political philosophy as applied to social issues we grapple with in everyday life. The course focuses on skills-development as much as abstract knowledge. Students who attend lectures, participate as fully as possible in the course, and keep up with their assignments, will experience an increase in their reading comprehension and ability to think critically, to the end of improving their sensitivity to reasoned discussion. This course seeks to present an “intellectual antidote” to some of the deeply anti-intellectual and anti-critical attitudes increasingly prevalent in North American culture.

The course will be broken down into roughly two parts. The first part will focus on the basics and mechanics of argumentation, identifying logical fallacies, reading comprehension, and the use of statistics. With these skills as a background, the second half of the course will go on to think specifically about different approaches we find in political philosophy about different social issues. Students will be asked to look at a social issue from various perspectives in order to appreciate both the complexity of the issues and the different approaches to them.

Critical Thinking: Argument and Argumentation. 2014. 2nd Edition. Authors: Jean Saindon and Peter John Krek. ISBN: 978-0-17-666100-7. Publisher: Nelson Education.

Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? 2009. Author: Michael J. Sandel. ISBN: 978-374-53250-5. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.

1. Analyzing Arguments In Class Quiz: 15% October 23^rd
2. December Exam: Fallacies and Non-Deductive Arguments 20% December Exam
3. Passage Analysis Take-Home 15%                                                 January 8^th
4. Critical Response Paper 15% March 18^th
5. In-Class Final Test 20% April 1st
6. In-Class Attendance and Exercises: 15% Throughout but assigned at the end of the class

Total: 100%

Class Schedule:

September 4 (Week One) Introduction and Course Overview

September 11 (Week Two) What is Critical Thinking? Should I Care?

September 18 (Week Three) Introduction to Arguments: What is an Argument? Why does it matter? Saindon and Krek Module 1

September 25 (Week Four) Analyzing Arguments: Saindon and Krek Module 3

October 2^nd (Week Five) Non-Deductive Arguments S&K Module 5

October 9^th (Week Six) Assessing Claims S&K Module 6

October 16^th (Fall Reading Week)

October 23^rd (Week Seven) In-Class Quiz

October 30^th (Week Eight) Fallacies I S&K Module 7 (pp. 164-184 up to Section 7.4)

November 6^th (Week Nine) Fallacies II and Neutralizing Fallacies S&K Module 7 (pp. 184-209)

November 13 (Week Ten) Fallacies III and Neutralizing Fallacies

November 20 (Week Eleven) Passage Analysis part I

November 27 (Week Twelve) Passage Analysis Part II

Passage Analysis Take-Home

Winter Break: December 3^rd – January 6^th

January 8^th (Week Thirteen) Overview of the Term

Passage Analysis Assignments Due In Class

January 15^th (Week Fourteen) Sandel Chapter 1“Doing the Right Thing”

January 22^nd (Week Fifteen) Sandel Chapter 2 Utilitarianism

January 29^th (Week Sixteen) Libertarianism

February 5^th (Week Seventeen) Markets & Morals

February 12^th (Week Eighteen) Kantian Ethics

February 19 (Winter Reading Week)

February 26^th (Week Nineteen) Rawls: “Justice As Fairness”

March 4^th (Week Twenty) Arguing Affirmative Action

March 11^th (Week Twenty-One) Aristotle and Virtue Ethics

March 18^th (Week Twenty-Two) Dilemmas of Loyalty

Critical Response Paper Due In Class

March 25^th (Week Twenty-Three) Justice and the Common Good: Course Wrap-Up

April 1^st (Week Twenty-Four) In-Class Test

TBA