So I was accepted to Kent State. Hurray! In order to achieve my goal of unifying all my interests into one field of study (philosophy of science) I need to pick up a few philosophy courses to get into a graduate program. It sounds like I will need about 18 credit hours to be considered for a program. At Oberlin I had 3, so it's down to 15 hours or about 5 courses. This semester I'm taking two: Introduction to Formal Logic and Principles of Thinking. I'm really excited about Formal Logic because I loved Propositional Calculus (which is a branch of logic) in my Discrete Mathematics course. It'll be fun to expand on what I already know and since Propositional Calculus is a symbolic logic, I won't have to learn a lot of new symbolism (which anyone that has ever seen me attempt to recall a Kanji knows is not my forte).
Principals of Thinking also sounds interesting as it is a course centering around the structure of argument and types of argument. Though I have had some of that in my rhetoric courses, they naturally centered more on the structure and implication of word/grammatical usage rather than the validity of the argument or type of argument itself. So there is plenty of new meat there, but again I'll also walk in with a bit of an edge. Regardless, it will be nice refresher and also add to my base of understanding.
The other courses available at Kent were Intro to Philosophy and Intro to Ethics. I had an introduction to philosophy and morality at Oberlin so in some ways taking either would have been a bit of an overlap. The ethics class sounded interesting and was a 200 level course where as Principals is only a 100 level, so ethics might have been better for me, but it is hard to say due to the fact that I have already had an intro ethics course. So I went with what was available and what sounded more interesting!
I guess I'll need a new icon as my "Andrew Magnum" was for my role as teacher, but now that I'm a student again I better whip something up.
Ahhh, it's good to be back in academia!
