PHIL/REL 150P
Life, Death, and Meaning
Spring 2021
3 Credit Hours
Dr. D.E. Wittkower
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Email: dwittkow@odu.edu
Office Hours: On campus and online, by appointment, or you can drop in my Zoom room and if I can I’ll head in there to meet you. I am also often in my office between 1:00 and 2:00 on any given weekday if you want to swing by.
Course Description:
What is the meaning of life, and what role might the end of life play in living meaningfully? This course provides an introduction to philosophy and religious studies through an investigation of different views on death and the meaning of life from diverse cultures and identities.
Learning Objectives:
Students in any P general education course should acquire
- a basic understanding of several foundational questions in one or more of the major areas of philosophy, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory (including ethics)
- a basic familiarity with the answers that diverse schools of philosophical or religious thought have proposed to foundational philosophical questions and the arguments with which they have supported these answers
- a facility with critical thinking and reasoning, especially concerning the construction and evaluation of arguments
In PHIL/REL 150P in particular, my goal is for you to engage with diverse traditions and ideas to find ways that death can help bring focus and purpose to life, and to gain skills in critical thinking, critical reading, and culturally and historically contextual interpretation of texts. It is also a goal of this course to provide you with a view of what the fields of Philosophy and Religious Studies are like so that you can see whether they may be majors or minors you’d like to pursue.
Readings and materials:
All readings will be provided in electronic form on Blackboard except
Camus, Albert. The Plague. Laura Marris trans. Knopf. 0593318668.
No additional materials are required.
Assignments:
There are several weekly assignments that work in approximately the same format every week. There is also a final writing assignment which is summative, but which requires only thoughtfully looking back at your work over the semester—it is not a “final paper” or a “term paper.”
This is an introductory-level course, so our assignments are aimed at providing the support you need to read, understand, and apply our course materials in a way that provides you with some experience and training in critical thinking, and some knowledge of the field of philosophy and how it works.
Most instructional weeks will follow this structure: Reading, Response, and Activity. Most weeks will focus on a single reading which will be broken into two parts.
- Reading: The reading will usually be on Blackboard, and may be in a VoiceThread assignment. (VoiceThreads will have embedded audio commentaries to guide your reading, each being about 1 to 5 minutes. Some commentaries will have (optional) discussion questions—you can reply in the VoiceThread and read replies from other students in the course.)
- Response: After completing the reading, you will complete a written response. This will consist of (a). 3 words you learned (or learned more about) from the reading, (b). 3 ideas or concepts you learned about (or learned more about) from the reading, and (c). your short response (100–200 words) to a writing prompt that draws on the reading and on my commentary in the reading.
- Activity: There will be an activity for you to do. This could be interviewing a friend about their views. It could be going for a walk every day for a few days. I might ask you to write a letter to your future self. If this activity generates writing or another artifact, I’ll ask you to submit it; if it does not, I’ll ask you to complete and submit a short reflection on the activity (maybe 300–400 words).
For most weeks, your workflow will be:
Tuesday: Complete first reading section and response before class.
Thursday: Complete second reading section and response before class.
Sunday: Complete Activity before the end of the week.
Once you ignore breaks, we have 14 instructional weeks in a regular semester. During finals week you’ll complete a final reflective writing assignment of 750–1200 words in which you will talk about ideas from readings and from activities that you will take with you from this class, and why they were meaningful or important for you.
The Schedule lists Readings for the days on which those readings are discussed in class. Readings should be done before class on the day they appear on the schedule, and Responses for the reading should be brought in to class that day, or submitted on Blackboard before class, or both! If I have them in class I can look through the words and ideas right before class, which will help me to direct discussion to meet you where you are.
Grading:
For each class meeting except for the first one, the ‘syllabus day’, there will be a Reading, and you will complete a Response for each Reading. For each week, there will be an Activity. This will total 14 Activities, and 27 Readings+Responses.
Each Response will contain three words and ideas, worth .25 pts, and a response to the writing prompt, worth 1 point, for a total of 1.25 pts. Each Activity will be worth 4 points. All together, this equals 27 x 1.25 = 33.75 points for the Responses and 4 x 14 = 56 points for the Activities, totaling 89.75 points. The Final Reflective Writing Assignment will be worth 12 points, making it possible to earn 101.75 points in the course.
Grade is not by percentage: you start with 0 points and earn points from there. But, to keep things pretty intuitive, your point total at the end of the semester is worth the grade that corresponds to the familiar letter grade percentage ranges:
A: ≥ 93–101.75 points
A-: 90–92 points
B+: 87–89 points
B: 83–86 points
B-: 80–82 points
C+: 77–79 points
C: 73–76 points
C-: 70–72 points
D+: 67–69 points
D: 63–66 points
D-: 60–62 points
F: ≤ 59 points
Attendance:
You should be in every class, and should participate in every class discussion. “Participate” doesn’t necessarily mean talking, although that’s good too. You should have the reading done, and you should have thought about it some. You should be listening to me, and to your peers, and thinking about your own views on things. We’ll do in-class writing sometimes, so you should have paper and something to write with.
If you can’t make it to class, let me know ahead of time if you can, and I can probably Zoom you in. If it’s last-minute, or we can’t get you there virtually, we’ll make arrangements to meet in person or over Zoom to go over things together.
Other Requirements:
There are no other requirements. There are no exams, quizzes, or tests. There is no final exam.
Educational Accessibility:
I am committed to supporting students who have disabilities, and encourage any student who stands to benefit from accommodations to discuss the matter with me and/or with the Office of Educational Accessibility. Accommodations should not be thought of as a benefit, as a crutch, or as something to be used only if necessary—accommodations are intended to allow all students equal ability to succeed based on their talent and effort. Please feel free to discuss the matter with me either formally or informally.
If you experience a disability that will impact your ability to access any aspect of my class, please let me know so that we can work together to ensure that appropriate accommodations are available to you. If you feel that you will experience barriers to your ability to learn and/or testing in my class and do not have an accommodation letter, please let me know and consider scheduling an appointment with OEA to determine if academic accommodations are necessary. Additional information is available at the OEA website: http://www.odu.edu/educationalaccessibility/
Technology Policy
Studies have shown that classroom use of digital devices negatively impacts student learning—even when these devices are used in class-relevant ways, such as for taking notes. Worse yet, studies have also shown that there is a negative environmental effect: the use of screens not only diminishes the learning of students using screens, but also negatively impacts students next to and behind students using screens.
If you have accessibility needs that require the use of screens in class—for example, if you have a disability that makes taking notes by hand difficult—then you should absolutely feel free to do so. Also, if there are special circumstances that may require you to stay in touch with someone during class, such as childcare concerns or a relative in the hospital, then you should also feel free to have your phone handy and check in from time to time. But if you do need to use a screen in class, please sit in the back of the class, and if these unusual circumstances do not apply to you, please refrain from all use of screens in class.
Policy on Children in Class
Ideally, you will all be able to be present and focused in every class session, and having children with you diminishes this attention—but things don’t always work out. Illnesses, school closings, and other circumstances are likely to, at some point, create problems for students who are parents. In these circumstances, I invite you to bring your children to class at your discretion.
As with the use of screens, the presence of children presents a possible distraction to other students. If you are bringing your child to class, please sit near a door so that you can easily step outside if necessary.
Basic Needs Policy
If you experience homelessness, domestic abuse, mental illness, or onset of mental or physical disability, and feel comfortable approaching me for support, please know it would not be the first time I’ve helped one of my students with these issues. If you experience these or other problems, such as injury or hunger, I will be glad to help and will do my best to offer support and connect you with appropriate resources. If you prefer not to talk to me about problems like these, write ODUCares@odu.edu and they will help you to get support and to navigate administrative hurdles. Please be aware that with the exception of Counseling and Student Health Services, all ODU employees are Title IX mandated reporters, so don’t tell me about sexual harassment or assault if you do not wish to take action on the issue.
Honor Code:
All work handed in should be your own. All quotes should be exact quotes, and should be in quotation marks. All writing which is not an exact quote and which is not in quotation marks should be entirely your own composition. Taking someone else’s writing, rearranging it, and switching some words out with synonyms is plagiarism, not paraphrasing. A paraphrase should indicate the source of the idea you’re explaining, and should be entirely your own writing, starting from scratch.
You may certainly discuss our course materials with others outside of class, and are free to compare notes and brainstorm. You should not, however, write together or share outlines, unless you have specifically discussed the idea of writing together with me ahead of time.
Unsure about how to paraphrase correctly, or when a source needs to be cited? Ask me, or ask a librarian. We are glad to help. You should be confident about your writing; if you are nervous about doing something wrong, come talk to one of us about it, and let us help you gain that confidence.
Additionally, keep in mind that re-using any or all of an assignment completed for another course also constitutes academic dishonesty. This kind of “self-plagiarism” is less frequently discussed, and students less frequently realize its wrongness. In part, this is because of the term itself—so-called “self plagiarism” isn’t entirely the same sort of wrong as plagiarism.
In plagiarism, you are passing off some one else’s work for your own—this obviously is not happening in self-plagiarism! Instead, you are passing off work already done for new work. What’s being misrepresented is not the author and the effort and creativity, but instead only the effort and creativity.
If we view writing as merely demonstrating knowledge—the “vessel” view of education encouraged by our overemphasis on standardized testing—you’re not learning anything by writing, but merely exhibiting the knowledge that you’ve internalized and are able to repeat. On this view, the wrongness of self-plagiarism is not apparent. However, there is—or ought to be—much more to writing than merely regurgitating information. The writing process, when approached properly and in a thesis-driven context at the very least, is a process of learning and discovery. It is this value which is being falsely represented in self-plagiarism.