Philosophy majors of Veeky Forums, I need your help...

Philosophy majors of Veeky Forums, I need your help. I'm writing a story where the two main characters are undergrad philosophy students, and I am but a humble stemfag.
Who/what has the average student in the U.S. or Canada covered by second or third year? Summarize your first couple years of college for me.

Hmmm probably dead white males LMAO

Dumb frogfaggot

first day next semester go grab a couple syllabi

Or just look online...

Almost all unis have syllabus and graduation requirements on their websites

>I'm writing a story where the two main characters are undergrad philosophy students

Sounds like a real page turner, right out of the gate man. I'm sold, what kind of advance you looking for?

that is a distinct possibility

>read a syllabus
I already have, but I know from personal experience that the syllabus can only tell you so much.
What I really want to hear is your personal experiences, and what elements you think characterize a philosophy student.

The fact that they're philosophy students is mostly tangential. It's just a contrivance to explain why they have the summer off (they can only find minimum-wage jobs, and they're too full of themselves to put on an apron). One of them is a piece of shit who uses Marx to pick up red-haired sluts at a campus bar.
I just want to be sure I've got my facts straight.

>One of them is a piece of shit who uses Marx to pick up red-haired sluts at a campus bar.

See, what I love about this is the realism too, you know how much ass Marx reels in.

Love everything about it! It's a high concept thrill ride waiting to pound your ass in!

I could put in a good word at the New Yorker, but you're probably way ahead of me.

What you gonna name it? I mean, you got title yet? If it's alright with you, I'd like to suggest some.

"Auburn Dialectics"
"Abandoned Aprons"
"Bar Boys: A Rebel's Tale"
"The Gentle Labourer and the Friend Who Picks Up Redheads"
"Baby's Theory of Value"

>Who/what has the average student in the U.S. or Canada covered by second or third year?

The majority of that should be GE. They will probably also have Intro to philosophy, Intro to critical reasoning (or Intro to logic equivalent), History of phil. Ancient Greek, and then one or two intro courses they are interested in for whatever branch (intro to ethics, intro to epistemology, intro to phil. religion, etc.).

Then maybe one course on a particular philosopher, like a course on Descartes, Hume, or Kant. They might instead of having one of these courses or one of the intro courses have more courses around what they are interested in, like History of Phil.(History of phil. Medieval) or Logic (Symbolic logic).

It's usually by the third year that a student should have a majority of the classes be in philosophy and be taking more and more classes around one specific topic.

>you know how much ass Marx reels in
His character is based on my own experiences in a college town. You probably don't know this, but people who get laid typically tailor their approach to the target in some way. That particular example was inspired by seeing a guy hit on a girl by switching to activism memes (Monsanto sucks, etc.) the moment she said she was in sociology.
>It's a high concept thrill ride
It's porn.
>waiting to pound your ass in!
It's straight porn.

One doesn't take summers off when they work minimum wage, dumb fuck

>His character is based on my own experiences

wait a minute...you actually had experiences while in college? Nobody does that anymore! What are you, a freaking super hero!??

Holy fuck this story is going to smash some dicks.

By
>they're too full of themselves to put on an apron
I meant to say that they refuse to "debase" themselves by accepting the sort of minimum-wage work which would typically entail wearing an apron (fast food). "Hanging up your apron" is a common figure of speech here, meaning "to finally get a real job". Maybe it's a regional thing.

>Philosophy majors of Veeky Forums, I need your help. I'm writing a story where the two main characters are undergrad philosophy students, and I am but a humble stemfag.
my help is: don't write that story

Thanks for the confirmation, that's about what I'd gathered so far. I've taken a couple of those GE courses, so I should be alright with a little more reading.

Is it yaoi fiction? I'll help you if that's the case.

Your feelings are valid.

Thanks for the offer. It's more of a cuckolding/impregnation thing, though.
I guess the part where one of the unemployed philosophy students gets on his knees in front of a Howard Roark stand-in and begs to suck his dick could be interpreted as a bit gay. I think it captures the essence of the liberal arts class struggle, though.

Kants critique of the ontological argument

>Philosophy majors of Veeky Forums, I need your help.
>I am but a humble stemfag
My advice: kys.

OP, here's a list of books I was assigned in my undergrad (graduate, now).

Freshman: A lot of surveys and overviews
Sophomore: Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, Beowulf, Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Junior: Finnegans Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, Watchmen
Senior: The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, 50 Shades Darker, Sport and the Territorial Anus

Pretty alright but I wish they didn't cram the whole graduating class into huge seminars in senior year.

>The Fault in Our Stars
>50 Shades Darker
>Senior Year

Did you go to a meme school or something?

What I thought a second year philosophy undergrad would look like
>Plato and Aristotle were so interesting, and I intend to keep reading the classics, but I think my passion really lies in German Idealism. I'm also going to nurture a side interest in medieval epistemology by doing some deep readings in Aquinas over the summer.
>No way. Political philosophy is where it's at. I blazed through Strauss during the break and now I can't stop reading the the Early Moderns. I'm thinking of specialising in legal philosophy!
>I wonder what third year holds in store for us? I'm finally ready to tackle Heidegger! I can't wait!
>Woo! Let's jerk each other off!

What fourth year philosophy undergrads actually look like
>Uh I took a bunch of classes I guess. Do you know about the.. the normanon? I forget what it's called.
>Was that, like, the thing where.. Nietzsche.. no, wait, that's the genealogy of morals??
>I don't remember. You should totally take McFaggio's seminar though. It's a bird course. He's getting ready to retire and doesn't care anymore, so you can basically just resubmit an old paper.
>Cool. I applied to grad school by the way. I'm a philosopher now!
>Me too! We can be Elite Philosophy Thinkin' Guys together, even though we don't know anything and the only reading we ever did was in whatever blurbs the professors mandated on the syllabus, and even then I only did like half of them haha lol jokes bro lmao I'm a retard but I still have a 3.5 GPA which looks impressive even though it means I'm a flailing mediocrity
>OMG I'm such a Kantian. I study Kant. By which I mean I took three courses on him, got a B on an essay where I half-understood the Prolegomena, and now I'm supposedly in grad school studying Kant even though I've still never read a twentieth of his work or even the first Critique in full. But let me keep saying "heh, I study Kant" like I'm a member of the academic elite now
>Jeez grad school is so rough jeez man these facile non-essays we're writing without actually reading more about our specialties jeez whew darn I'm so overworked but that's the life of an elite academic ;) We're members of the elite now so we can say "heh, I'm a Kantian I study Kant ;)" all day long. That's what I'm gonna do instead of reading Kant.
>Haha I'm a Hegelian now because I took one class on one snippet of the Phenomenology and I sort of understood what was going on so I'm gonna go around saying I'm a Hegelian now forever. You can be the Kant guy and I'll be the Hegel guy even though neither of us reads German or even reads Kant or Hegel and we'll cruise around and pick up chicks bro. Grad school is hard work bro, I'm an academic now. I wear sweatervests and attend classes. I'm a Hegelian dude.
>Me too man I love Hegel. Dialectics and shit. Kant's the normonomenal something uhhhhhh I'm a fourth year """Kant"""" """"""scholar"" and I casually say things that betray I have an incompetent first year undergrad's common misunderstanding of Kant

First year philosophy classes come in three forms, typically.

(1) Historical introductions to philosophy. Sometimes this means: read a bunch of the classic Platonic dialogues. It may mean: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethieus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes. At Harvard, the first philosophy class any one takes (major or non-major) covers Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant (early modern philosophy). Here, you let great and influential philosophical texts motivate the problems for the students. Part of what motivates students to think certain knowledge matters is by reading and feeling how damn much it mattered to Descartes, etc.

(2) "Problems in philosophy." Usually based around three or four puzzle questions or topics (her'es a puzzle about personal identity, what is knowledge, is abortion moral, what is beauty, etc). Often you read a smattering of ancient/earlymodern and contemporary philosophy. Often the focus is more on learning to "think like a philosopher" (understanding argumentative structure, mastering difficult & abstract concepts precisely, etc) than on any one topic.

(3) Topical introductions. Typically intro to philosophy of mind, or philosophy of science, or political philosophy, or ethics. Here you master some of the main topics and debates in one subfield of philosophy. In ethics, you will read about consequentialism and Kantianism. In philosophy of science, you will probably learn about the paradoxes of confirmation and induction, you will read Kuhn, you will read Popper, etc.

I should say that, for any one of the categories I've just identified, there is tremendous variation in what the courses' syllabus actually might be. There's a hundred different ways to teach an intro to early modern course, there's a hundred different ways to teach intro to phil mind, etc etc.

After the first course in philosophy, there's even more variation, which depends quite a lot on the student.

By the end of the first year, most philosophy majors will probably have taken: at least one ethics course, at least one history course, at least one logic course, and at least one course in philosophy of language/mind/science/action/metaphysics/epistemology.

Other than that, how your undergraduate philosophy experience goes depends enormously on

(a) the overall characteristic of the department you're in (is it well-funded? are the faculty involved and inviting? are there a lot of course offerings in a wide array of areas? what material does the department prioritize, and what does it downplay?)

(b) the overall quality of your fellow philosophy majors and the intellectual millieu of your campus (having an eager group of fellow philosophy majors to actually discuss things with is often a massive bonus to being a philosophy major)

(c) your own interests. Some students get really smitten with ethics, and so they take classes on the history of utilitarianism, perhaps a class on Kant's ethics, or Aristotle's ethics, or a class on the nature of moral truth, or a class on moral psychology. Some students get really into philosophy of language and go nuts for logic, take a class on the metaphysics of possible worlds, or in direct reference, or whatever.