Alexander T. K. Elnabli
This curriculum unit is designed as part of a yearlong sequence in an introductory philosophy course called “The Problems of Philosophy.” In this unit, the “problem” under consideration is “What makes a claim about the world true?” The answer provided by students with a contemporary American education is inevitably “true claims are objective facts” as distinct from “subjective opinions” which may be valid for an individual but are -- more or less -- not subject to legitimate disagreement. Within this view, students take for granted that objectivity is the domain of empirical sciences and, perhaps, the only space for making true claims about nature, where subjectivity concerns axiological matters, including taste (aesthetics) and values in ethics, morality, and politics.
This unit aims to complicate this naïve objective/subjective distinction so that students can engage seriously in philosophical debate about metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. The title of the unit parodies the structure of the unit in which a series of claims to “objective fact” are shown to be less certain than they may at first appear. In the process, the aim is not for students to reject the notions of objectivity and subjectivity but better to understand these as historically constructed, complex concepts whose meaning and relationship to knowledge, truth, and value are themselves topics of ongoing philosophical debate.
This unit is designed to be introduced either (A) as a chronological follow-up to a unit on ancient metaphysics, having students explore the transition from ancient natural philosophy to the development of modern conceptions of scientific knowledge as “objective” or (B) to precede the unit on the ancients as a way of problematizing students’ assumptions about what constitutes “objective” knowledge that they might be able to appreciate ancient perspectives without easily writing them off as merely outdated.
