1 Course Description

Welcome to Phil-P 102 Critical Thinking and Applied Ethics.

This course is designed to fulfill the IU South Bend campus-wide general education requirement in critical thinking.

“Critical thinking” refers to the set of skills involved in recognizing, analyzing, and constructing arguments for claims or beliefs as we seek to establish what is true. Much of the course gets into the nuts and bolts of how arguments work.

As an “applied ethics” course, the goal is to help you understand the role that ethical (and other) values play in our lives, and how argumentation that involves values both depends on and differs from reasoning about non-evaluative matters. For even if agreement about matters of value is sometimes challenging, it is possible to think critically in ethical matters and to have better and worse arguments for our beliefs.

Gaining proficiency in this sort of critical thinking isn’t just an academic need — it will help you understand and engage the world around you and be able to resist those who either intentionally or unintentionally would deceive you.

This course is driven by concrete scenarios and real-world issues we face today, but it is framed by 2500 years of Western philosophy and the conceptual and analytical tools developed in this tradition. Thus, the course provides a good introduction to philosophy, and it will hopefully encourage some of you to pursue further study within the philosophy department.