20 Century Phil Spring 2008 XC topics

Instructions:

[1] Choose one topic; rough estimate: 600 words to a topic.¹

[2] Please, please observe writing guidelines and consult error logs, in particular:

• Explain technical terms (your own or anyone else's)!
• Necessarily explain terms here in italics.
• Provide a page reference to any quotations or references to texts.
• Do not cite classnotes from the teacher.
• Explain your ideas and justify them. Do not depend on mind-reading or automatic assent.
• Write a clean, clear, plain English.

[3] Indicate as soon as possible if you intend to do an XC.

[4] The XC, if it receives a grade of [B], will increment overall grade, thus if overall grade is [B+], the XC will increment to [A-].

Topics:

[1] This topic is, I suspect, particularly 'challenging'. I am offering extra extra-credit. Enter at your own risk; some have read it and lost their sanity. You have been warned!

[2] I propose the following explanation of Sartre's idea of bad faith:

One has a kind of twilight anxious awareness of one's own freedom (I am on my own) and one's own contingency (my existence is in itself pure accident and without meaning, not to mention impermanent); Bad faith is an attempt to escape this anxious awareness of freedom and contingency.

You may or may not accept this or may emend it but try in any case to explain how the Coquette², the Closet Homosexual and the Champion of Sincerity are models of bad faith (as you understand it).

[3] Everyone has a final vocabulary, a set of terms which are basic to their scale of values, for which, Rorty claims, there is “no non-circular argumentative discourse” (Rorty 73), the difference between the ironist and the metaphysician (in Rorty's terminology) being that, for example, the metaphysician believes the rejection of the proposition, “Blacks have no rights which whites are bound to respect,” is the discovery of a true fact, betokens moral and political progress, not just an essentially arbitrary, change of 'vocabulary'.

[a] What is in your view the best objection to this position and does Rorty have a rebuttal? Is it a good rebuttal?

[b] Sartre would say Rorty's metaphysician is in bad faith (see my explanation above) as evidenced by what Sartre says about the spirit of everyday morality (Sartre 76) and the attitude – 'l'esprit de serieux' - of the “serious man who apprehends values in terms of the world” and does not (want to) see that “Value derives its being from its exigency and not its exigency from its being” (Sartre 76). Would Rorty agree that his metaphysician is in bad faith, that is, would Rorty adopt Sartre's 'vocabulary' in this case?