General Education Offerings

Because of its traditional centrality to the curriculum in higher education, philosophy remains an important part of the general education offerings of most colleges and universities. At UNC, courses in philosophy can be used to satisfy a part of the requirement in Arts and Letters. The department’s general education offerings are as follows:

• PHIL 100—Introduction to Philosophy
• PHIL 101—Critical Thinking and Writing
• PHIL 110—Figures in Western Philosophy
• PHIL 305—Ethics in Theory and Practice

PHIL 100, PHIL 110, and PHIL 305 can all be taken to satisfy half the Arts and Letters content area requirement, and PHIL 101 can be taken to satisfy the requirement of a course in intermediate composition. PHIL 100 and PHIL 110 are both basic introductory courses, but of rather different sorts: while PHIL 100 is a problems course devoted to an examination of central issues in the areas of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, PHIL 110 is a more historically oriented course devoted to a close examination of seminal works in the history of Western philosophy. PHIL 305, on the other hand, is a course that combines a survey of normative ethical theories with an introduction to applied ethics.

Prior work in philosophy is not presupposed in PHIL 305 any more than it is in PHIL 100 or PHIL 110; all the higher number is meant to suggest is that the two or three years additional life experience one has under one’s belt by the time one is a junior or a senior may enable one to profit more from the course then than one might as a freshman or sophomore.

PHIL 101, on the other hand, is a course eminently suitable for freshmen. It combines a survey of a number of topics that belong to logic with an effort to help students refine their understanding of the principles of critical and evaluative writing. As already indicated above, it is designed to satisfy the intermediate composition requirement in the general education program—not the content area requirement in Arts and Letters that the other three courses are designed to satisfy.

All four of these courses are challenging courses. You can expect to be required to engage in a kind of careful, reflective thinking in them that may be quite different from anything you’ve encountered before.