IS CPHL214 A PHILOSOPHY COURSE OR WHAT - Assignment Example

Critical Response to IS CPHL214 A PHILOSOPHY OR WHAT? The passage to be critiqued has its fair share of logical flaws and fallacies. At places it makes suppositions and claims that are not warranted or backed by facts. The first paragraphs are fairly coherent and logically consistent, excepting for the last two lines. It says, “Everybody knows that philosophy is of no practical use. Since its not of any practical use, it must be a philosophy course”. This is a logical error, for philosophy is not the only thing that is of no practical use.

Whether or not the course is of any practical use can be one of many indicators to decide if it a philosophy course, but only the only indicator. In the second paragraph, unsubstantiated attributions are made to the professor. While the professor might have said “critical thinking skills are good things to have”, he did not seemed to have said that “its good to be picky, argumentative, always finding something wrong with whatever students write, and cynical”. The latter is merely an interpretation on part of the writer as to what the professor meant by his comment.

This interpretation comes across as exaggerated and negatively biased against the professor. Moreover, while there is a link between critical thinking courses and the broader philosophy courses, whether or not the courses are “good” is an irrelevant deviation from the argument. The last two lines of the second paragraph are also display an error in syllogism. It doesn’t stand to reason that all critical thinking courses are philosophy courses, just because this claim cannot be proven false.

In the third paragraph, the perusal of hear-say evidence of Bertha weakens the argument. Moreover, Bertha’s friends don’t represent the entire student population, in order that sweeping conclusions could be made based on the evidence provided by her. That Bertha’s friends’ course did and CPHL214 did not talk about the “meaning of life” doesn’t make the two courses incompatible – they could just be two variations of a common theme.In the fourth paragraph the assertion that “meaning of life is interesting” appears arbitrary, unsubstantiated as it is with any rationale.

Likewise, “there’s no way CPHL214 is interesting” is also a subjective judgment and not an indisputable fact. Defining philosophy as the “study of human life” is too simplistic and vague for the purposes of classifying CPHL214.Coming to the fifth paragraph the fact that the professor works for money and that he has a stake in the functioning of the philosophy department doesn’t make him a liar. Once again, the relation between philosophy professors, eccentric behavior and false claims is an error in deductive logic and syllogism.

The final paragraph, the assertion that philosophy professors are “worthy of imitation” is arbitrary and subjective. And the concluding words “you would want to spend all your time criticizing” is tangential to the main concern of the write-up, namely, “Is CPHL214 a Philosophy course?”