A Guide for Students and AdvisorsMany people transfer to ESU wanting General Education credit for courses that they have taken elsewhere. There is much confusion about just what constitutes a Philosophy & Religious Studies General Education course, and so the following guide should give some idea of what criteria are used in determining eligibility. Please note, though, that the listed criteria are not exhaustive, and the final decision is at the discretion of the deparment chairperson.
The general criterion is that for a course to be transferrable as a course with General Education credit, that course must be substantially equivalent to a General Education course taught by the ESU Philosophy & Religious Studies Department. Furthermore, the entire course (not merely a few weeks of it) must teach Philosophy. Philosophy courses and Religious Studies courses are treated separately below.
Courses from institutions with which ESU already has worked out course comparisons that have not already transferred automatically will not be given additional consideration. ESU has published a guide to how courses from other institutions will transfer. It must be stressed that although your course may be said to "transfer", this does not necessarily mean that your course will transfer as General Education. To go to ESU's transfer guide, click here.
PhilosophyPHIL 110 GE: Introduction to Philosophy
In order to qualify as being equivalent to PHIL 110 GE: Introduction to Philosophy, a course must be a general introduction to philosophy. Philosophy is the rigorous study of topics such as ethics, the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and logic, as well as the social, political and religious aspects of human existence. It is important to understand that university-level philosophy study intends to be rigorous. By this it is meant that philosophy addresses these issues in terms of reasoned argumentation. The point of philosophy courses is not primarily just to present "ideas" or "world-views", but to prove definite claims about philosophical issues through reason. In the study of philosophy, every position must be argued. These arguments are evaluated to assess whether the stated position has been proven. This reasoned argumentation is normally found in essays, treatises and dialogues. While philosophers have sometimes written novels, poems and plays, most of these do not have the reasoned argumentation that can be subjected to rigorous analysis. Thus every philosophy course stresses the importance of critical thinking.
The implications of this for transfer credits is that only those courses that address reasoned argumentation can be considered as equivalent to PHIL 110. Courses that address, for instance, "Great Ideas in Literature" are not philosophy courses. General humanities courses, which may include some discussion of a few philosophers among the discussion of other disciplines, are not acceptable.
Acceptable equivalents to PHIL 110 must also provide a general introduction to philosophy. A general introduction must cover at least three of the major sub-disciplines of philosophy as listed above. Courses that address only one specific subset of philosophy, such as "Death and Dying" courses, "Contemporary Moral Issues" courses, and others cannot be equivalent to PHIL 110, although some of these may possibly be equivalent to a GE course that has a prerequisite, or may at least count as ordinary philosophy electives.
PHIL 221 GE: Logic I
A transfer course may be said to be equivalent to PHIL 221 GE: Logic I if it is a rigorous introduction to deductive logic. The course should cover truth-functional logic and categorical logic. While some portion of the course might discuss informal fallacies and linguistic notions such as ambiguity and vagueness, at least 60% of the course should concern formal methods for evaluating the logical properties of sentences and arguments. The course should include precise definitions of the basic logic concepts: validity, soundness, cogency, equivalence, inconsistency, tautology, and contradiction. The course should include the techniques for translating English sentences into symbolic form and truth table methods for testing the logical properties of those forms. And the course should include a system of rules of inference, which includes some form of hypothetical reasoning to prove conditional claims and some form of indirect, reductio reasoning to prove negations.
A course in critical thinking would not be equivalent if it did not include the range and proportion of the formal elements listed above.
PHIL 231 GE: Ethics
A transfer course may be said to be equivalent to PHIL 231 GE: Ethics if it is a rigorous examination of the major ethical theories. An equivalent course must conduct an intensive study of the ethical theories of at least three of the following philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Bentham or J. S. Mill, and Nietzsche. As a rigorous examination of these theories, the course must examine how these philosophers argue for their positions, and also how these positions are to be applied. Courses that are issue-based, such as "Contemporary Moral Problems", medical ethics or business ethics, are not acceptable. Course that are oriented towards the code of ethics of a profession are not acceptable.
PHIL 241 GE: Philosophy of Art & Beauty
This course is an intensive study of the major philosophical theories of aesthetics. Any course to be considered equivalent to it should focus on aesthetic theory as such, and the argumentation given to support that theory. Acceptable courses will focus on the aesthetic theories at least three of the following philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Courses offered by non-philosophy departments, which consequently focus on a particular kind of art (such as "Aesthetics of Music", "Aesthetics of Painting", etc.), are not acceptable.
PHIL 251 GE: Ancient Philosophy
A transfer course equivalent to PHIL 251 must cover a significant portion of ancient Greek philosophy from Thales to Aristotle. The bulk of the course must be devoted to the study of major texts by Plato and Aristotle. The course must present the germinal ideas developed by the philosophers dominant within this time period, showing how successive thinkers revised, adapted and occasionally revealed as untenable the views of their predecessors as well as of some of their contemporaries.
Religious StudiesThe purpose of the two GE Religious Studies courses, PHIL 171 GE: RELS: Introduction to Religious Studies and PHIL 172 GE: RELS: Introduction to World Religions, is to provide the student with an opportunity to examine religious activities and beliefs in an objective and nonsectarian setting through the examination of world religions. An important aspect of this description is that a Religious Studies course must be "objective and nonsectarian". This means that courses geared towards believers of a particular faith are not acceptable. Furthermore, the course must serve as a general introduction to religious studies, whether by focussing on the major themes of religious life as presented by the various religious traditions in the world, or by presenting world religions as individual wholes. Such a course should thereby provide an overview of major world religions. Courses that focus on a particular religious issue or belief (such as "Death and Dying" courses) are not acceptable.
|
