Philosophy 234: Hopeful Citizenship for the 21st Century
Saint Mary's College

Learning Activities (LA) and reflective journals (600 points)

If philosophy is training for living well, then we need to practice philosophical living!

Throughout the semester, there will be six activities that students need to complete, which will ask them to undertake a specific practice and then reflect on that experience in a journal.

Journals should be about 500-600 words and should include specifics of what practice they adopted, how it went, and what they learned from it. Journal entries will be graded according to the journal rubric.

Learning activity 4 is focused on Intellectual Humility.

Critiquing your own view. Choose an article in the news that is written from a partisan perspective that you tend to agree with (in other words, an article that starts from a particular point of view and aims to convince the reader of that point of view). Cross-check the claims of this article with several different reliable sources, including one with a different partisan lean. Is the initial article being fair and honest in its assessment of the issue? If someone disagreed with the article, what would their strongest objection against it be? What has this exercise shown you about the role of viewpoint diversity and editorial choices in media in a liberal democracy?