Professor & Reference/Instruction Librarian
St. Mary's University
One Camino Santa Maria
San Antonio, TX 78228-8608
USA
dduesterhoeft@stmarytx.edu
PL 1301 Course Description
PL 1301 - Intro to Philosophy - This course explores foundational questions about human existence and a human being’s relationship to reality. It proceeds by examining the basic structure of conscious activity, which allows students to discover what they are doing when they are experiencing, understanding, knowing, and deciding. The goal of this analysis is the student’s critical self-appropriation of their own natures as knowers and doers. The course introduces the students to the origins of such systematic and critical self-appropriation in ancient Greece, in the philosophical activities of Socrates and Plato. It explores how the most basic and overarching questions about human existence that were asked by the first philosophers are still those that must be asked if people are to penetrate below the facts of everyday life to think deeply about what is real, true, valuable, just, and meaningful in human life.
Discover: Find articles, books, and more...
Research Starters
Research Starters is a feature in Discover that provides links to citable, authoritative summary articles for thousands of popular topics. Designed to assist users with their research, this feature was developed based on extensive studies with undergraduate and graduate students.
When a user conducts a search in Discover, a Research Starter may appear at the top of the Result List. For those topics identified as most popular, Research Starters will retrieve relevant articles that link the user to related information and detailed bibliographies.
Research Starters content is curated from a variety of high quality sources, both proprietary and encyclopedic, including:
- Salem Press
- Encyclopædia Britannica
- American National Biography
View a 2:23 minute tutorial video about Research Starters.
Philosophy Links
- The Philosophy Faculty of St. Mary's UniversityPart of a site highlighting Philosophy faculty at San Antonio higher education institutions. Produced by Andrew Hill.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy This link opens in a new windowThe Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) was founded in 1995 to provide open access to detailed, scholarly, peer-reviewed information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of philosophy. The IEP articles are written by experts but not for experts in analogy to the way the Scientific American magazine is written by scientific experts but not primarily for scientific experts.
The Encyclopedia also offers articles on all the most influential philosophers of earlier centuries, such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Mill, James, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Quine. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy This link opens in a new window
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy organizes scholars from around the world in philosophy and related disciplines. Each entry is maintained and kept up-to-date by an expert or group of experts in the field, and all entries and substantive updates are refereed by members of a distinguished Editorial Board. As of March 2018, there are nearly 1600 entries online.
