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January 12, 2005
Help!
At the last minute, I discovered that the textbook I've chosen for this coming semester (Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics) is out-of-stock with no date from the publisher as to when it will be available. My second choice was Shelly Kagan's Normative Ethics, not because I think Darwall's book is better (I don't really have much experience with either) but because I wanted to do both meta-ethics and normative ethics, and Darwall covers both. These were the only two booksI looked at that appealed to me given my very particular criteria for the courses I'm teaching this semester (a text and not an anthology that is sufficient for a class of students who have had two philosophy courses but no ethics and also for a class of students at a different school, all of whom are taking at least their second ethics course, some of whom used James Rachels' Elements of Moral Philosophy, my preferred book, in their first course).
That means I'm stuck using Kagan's book now without having had any chance to look through it and figure out how the semester will go. For one of the classes, it will arrive around the time the class starts. For the other I have maybe a week of classes before I have the book. Suffice it to say that I'm not in a good position. I have to figure out at least a tentative syllabus in the next day or so, in order to get my reasings for the first week submitted to the library for scanning in for online reserve. That means I need to work out my schedule for the semester fairly soon. Is there anyone who has used this as the sole or primary textbook for something on the order of a 300-level (junior level) course who has a syllabus you wouldn't mind sending me to give me some ideas to start with for organizing my course? Normally I wouldn't want to rely on someone else's structure for a course, but given my time constraints it would help to see what others have done with this book if I can.
Posted by Jeremy at January 12, 2005 3:08 PM
Comments
Although I have read both books I have not had the chance to use either in a class. However, over at Metatome (http://teach.metatome.com/), Adam Potthast has a post concerning his use of the Kagan book. Here is a link to the post:
http://teach.metatome.com/index.php?p=28
I hope that he can help you out, and good luck.
Posted by: Scott at January 13, 2005 10:18 AM