Hegel
 Syllabus

Class Procedure. Attendance is expected. Advance notice must be given of any unavoidable absence. In preparation for each meeting,   everyone is to have read the assigned text and at least one commentary or article concentrating on that text.   Every student should arrive in class with some prepared comments or questions about something in the reading assignment.   These will be collected, as described below. Treatment of each topic will commence with the presentation of a paper dealing with some problem raised by the text. The idea is that someone should have explored some important aspect of the text in greater depth than the other participants can be expected to do. The remainder of the period will be devoted, first, to discussing the paper(s), and thereafter to considering relevant issues not treated in them.

 Written Assignments. These will consist of reaction papers, seminar papers, and a term paper.

Reaction Papers & WebBoard. As noted in the preceding section, students are to arrive in class prepared for informed discussion of the assignment. Part of this preparation will be to have written out some query or argument prompted by their reading. These reactions should be approximately one double-spaced typewritten page in length. Although you must be prepared to share your ideas orally in class, the written version of these papers must be submitted by posting to the Aristotle Discussion conference on my WebBoard, a sort of electronic kiosk or bulletin board accessible with any frames-capable browser. Comments are to be submitted prior to the relevant class meeting so that other class members may have some time to consider, or even to respond to, the issues raised (after all, classes are a week apart). A reaction paper may be a “meta-reaction” taking issue with someone else’s posting. All of these papers together will represent about 15% of your grade. To be acceptable they must be relevant and informed. They will neither be individually graded nor returned with comments, although the professor will occasionally participate in the discussion. The grade will depend on the collective originality and philosophical or historical merit of one’s contributions. To place comments on the webboard one must join the conference by registering and setting a password which will authenticate authorship of contributions. The address of the WebBoard is http://www.engl.niu.edu:88/~jdye.

  Seminar Papers. Each student will present two (2) seminar papers, as mentioned under Class Procedure. Papers may be primarily historical and exegetical (if the problem is a matter of textual obscurity or ambiguity) or primarily philosophical (if the problem is a matter of the cogency of an argument or the adequacy of a theory). They need not be so original as to be provocative (although that would be nice), but they should always provide a fruitful focus for class discussion.   They must never be mere summaries of the text. They should cite and comment on the critical literature relevant to their topic, using   at least 3 high-quality commentaries or articles. They should be of such a length that they can be read in 30 minutes, reading at a moderate pace. A good paper illuminates some obscure argument, develops the implicit consequences of some doctrine, criticizes some published interpretation of the text, or proposes and defends some innovative way to understand an important part of the text.   Copies of the paper, meeting all the requirements for papers (see below), are to be provided for everyone at the time of presentation. However, a revised version may be submitted the following week should class discussion convince you that changes are desirable.

 Term Paper. In addition, there will be a  Final Paper analyzing on some problem in interpreting the  Phenomenology or on some philosophical issue raised by the  Phenomenology. This paper should be more extensively researched, more carefully argued, and may be longer than the seminar papers. As with the seminar papers, this paper may emphasize either historical or philosophical interpretation. In either case, you should carefully state the problem you intend to treat, explain its significance, assess its possible solutions, propose an hypothesis, argue convincingly for that hypothesis, and eliminate the major (published or imagined) competing hypotheses. Your treatment should make use of a half-dozen or more high-quality commentaries or articles.

 A formal prospectus of this paper, (1) indicating the topic, (2) fully describing the problem or issue to be treated, (3) outlining your anticipated procedure and probable conclusion, and (4) including an annotated bibliography of works to be consulted (a minimum of 6 books or articles, with at least a paragraph discussing the relevance of each work to your project), shall be submitted by 3 April 2001. The paper is due 1 May 2001 at 6:00 P.M., CDT

 Paper Requirements. All papers must conform to the standards expected of submissions to professional journals in philosophy. The document entitled “Requirements for Writing Assignments,” available from the course web page, contains a detailed statement of the obligatory style and structure.

 Consultation. Anyone requiring guidance with the assignments or assistance in interpreting the text is encouraged to contact the professor.