Welcome to Week 3! We’re moving on to Chapter 4 in our text this week, and remember that you have a critical task due at the end of this week as well.
There are just a couple of things I wanted to emphasize from Week 2 before we move on.
The definition of reason is of course important. Remember that reason is that process of supporting a claim or conclusion on the basis of evidence.
We saw in Chapter 2 some traditional views about reason
one especially that has persisted throughout time is that men are somehow seen as more rational than women, who are typically seen as more emotional.
That’s a stereotype, and part of critical thinking involves avoiding those kinds of stereotypes.
While reason has been seen as sort of the highest human capacity in Western philosophy
the text gave us a few examples of schools of thought, like Confucianism, where emotions are also seen as valuable.
At the end of the day, no matter how much we want to behave rationally, we are humans who have emotions
and those emotions are going to get involved in our decision-making processes.
We learned about emotional intelligence and empathy,
and in Discussion 2-1 we talked about situations where emotions got in the way of critical thinking.
We also learned about the relationship between faith and reason.
I want to emphasize that faith and reason do not have to be seen as mutually exclusive
– that is, if you are a person of faith you are not rational, or if you are a rational person you must not be a person of faith:
that is not what we are trying to say at all.
St. Thomas Aquinas is a philosopher who famously combined faith and reason
and there’s a really famous example of applying reason to faith by the mathematician Blaise Pascal, known as Pascal’s Wager.
Pascal says there are two possible states of the world: either God exists, or God does not exist.
Pascal also says there are two possible ways we can behave – we can behave righteously, or sinfully.
The decision table shows us what happens if we behave righteously and it turns out that God doesn’t exist
we haven’t lost anything.
But if we behave righteously and it turns out that God does exist: Whew!
On the other hand, if we behave sinfully and God doesn’t exist, well, we’ve had some short-term fun.
But if we behave sinfully and God does exist, then we’re stuck with eternal damnation.
Pascal thinks a rational person, when deciding how to behave, would behave righteously because the possible reward outweighs the potential punishment if we are wrong.
This is an example of applying reason to matters of faith.
Great job on your discussions last week. Remember to use examples from the text in your posts and cite them.
If you have any questions about how to do that, let me know. I’m going to post a sample discussion post in Module 3 that will help illustrate what I’m looking for when I look at citations.
I’m also going to be looking at your pre-writing assignments over the next couple of days so I can give you feedback in advance of Critical Task #1, which is the devil’s advocate assignment.
Now that we’ve talked in more detail about the concept of reason, we’re going to be looking more closely in Module 3 at knowledge.
We’ll be looking at the nature and limits of human knowledge, different views on the origins of our knowledge and how we know what we know, and how we can make errors in our thinking.
Your text defines knowledge as “information or experience that we believe to be true and for which we have justification or evidence”
We’ll talk about distinguishing between types of evidence, and this is something that came up back in Discussion 1-1:
how do we know the evidence we’re appealing to is trustworthy?
And we’ll be looking closely at ways our thinking can be clouded – different ways we can make errors in judgment.
Pay close attention to these in your text!
