The goals of this course are to develop students’ reading and writing skills and to introduce the role of research in college-level argumentative writing. By reading texts from many time periods and disciplines, we will come to see that an “argument” can take many forms. Such an array will cause us to challenge a most basic assumption about argumentation: that the strength of an argument has to do exclusively with the logic it employs.

Resting on an alternate hypothesis, this course will pay attention to the importance of emotion, from the structure of arguments of particular texts to our understanding of knowledge in its widest sense. We will consider the relationships among emotion, perception, and knowledge in Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Barthes, Peirce, Pynchon, and others.

We will devote most of class time to rigorous discussion of the texts. But, we will also spend some time in workshops covering the mechanics of argumentative writing, how to conduct effective research, and how to incorporate research into one’s own argument. We will write and revise two shorter papers and one long research paper.

Texts: Descartes, Passions of the Soul; “Meditations on First Philosophy”; C.S. Peirce, “Guessing,” “Deduction, Induction, Hypothesis”; T. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Plato, The Republic; Cicero, On the Ideal Orator; Aristotle, On Rhetoric; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Ridley Scott, Blade Runner; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.