Dear Philosophy & Film students:
As per the syllabus, your final paper should be typed in 12 font, double-spaced, with one-inch margins top, bottom and sides. You also need to have a cover page with the title of your paper, your name, the date, and my name, Dr. Botkin. Your paper should be about three pages long give or take a half page or so. Five points will be deducted if the paper is not stapled together. The paper is due on Friday, May 17th. You should place it under my office door by 4:00 pm.
if you are having trouble with a paper topic, see my suggestions below.
You may choose either to defend a thesis or conduct an analysis in terms of a compare and contrast. In either case, you need to analyze TWO movies that we watched and show how at least one of the philosophical problems we covered this semester is treated in those movies. Some of those topics were the following:
There is the distinction between nonhuman animals, humans and persons, and which, if any, have rights. You may also wish to review the claims in the Leiber text about Washoe-Delta having semantics but not syntax, Al, the computer, having syntax but not semantics, and persons having both. Other topics were as follows: free will, determinism, compatibilism, fate, foreknowledge, and how differing conceptions of morality figure into these positions; knowledge vs. mere belief; reality vs. mere appearance; certainty vs. skepticism; real, objective happiness vs. merely feeling happy; personal identity via the soul, psychological and bodily continuity and the possibility of surviving one’s death. Other quasi-philosophical topics dealt with being a loner vs. finding one’s niche and settling down; authenticity vs. being a fraud; high culture vs. low culture and possible criteria for moral and aesthetic judgments: is the Dude’s life really a less worthy a live than, say, the person who works 9-5, has a family and “plays the game?” Was Truman’s life really that bad? If so, why? Is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony objectively better (regardless of who likes it or not) than some of the classical country songs sung by George Jones?
I want you to cut your own path, to be creative, because YOU are special, just like everyone else!
Dr. Botkin
The list of movies to choose 2 from is:
Eraserhead
The matrix
The truman show
The big lebowski
Being there
One flew over the cukoos nest
Taxi Driver
Five easy pieces
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