Yes–now you too can better understand the way we conceptualize all that exists–from the comfort of your own home! It’s simple, free, and best of all, it’s fun! Biblioklept’s Ontology 101 is a course designed for working professionals who wish to approach the logic and philosophy of ontology, but don’t want to get bogged down in stodgy applications like taxonomy or geography. The different texts that comprise Biblioklept’s Ontology 101 course are contemporary, entertaining, highly visual, and applicable to modern social discourse.
Prerequisites: working knowledge of basic internet use. Adult level English language literacy. A few spare hours a week. A relatively open mind. A library card would be helpful. You’ll need a DVD player or VCR. If you can’t meet these requirements, you will need Biblioklept’s permission to join the class (you may have Biblioklept’s permission to join the class).
Credit hours: unfortunately, at this time Biblioklept remains an unaccredited (but nonetheless cherished) institution. However, all those who take the course are permitted a sense of smug self-satisfaction, a sharpened awareness of true irony, and existential crises galore.
Readings:
Week 1: Introduction, course overview, primer (below)
Week 2: Ways of Seeing, John Berger. Bertrand Russell overview.
Week 3: Mythologies, Roland Barthes. Baruch Spinoza overview.
Week 4: Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud. Martin Heidegger overview.
Week 5: Viewing–Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock. Primer: Laura Mulvey’s theory of “the gaze” (forthcoming). “Feminist Cinema and Visual Pain,” John Haber. Gilles Deleuze overview.
Week 6: Viewing–various TV commercials. “Visual Semiotics and the Production of Meaning in Advertising”. Mythologies (Roland Barthes) revisited. Michel Foucault overview.
Week 7: Viewing: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott). “Johnny Mnemonic,” William Gibson. “Simulacra and Simulations,” Jeanne Baudrillard. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel overview.
Week 8: Viewing: A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater). “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” Philip K. Dick. “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick,” Frank Rose. Existentialism overview.
Week 9: Selections from Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth. Selections from Girl with Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace. Postmodernism overview.
Week 10: Excerpts from The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche. Course summary and evaluation (primer revisited).
Primer: Before beginning John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, you’ll need a little background info about the history of philosophy. Biblioklept encourages you to go beyond the narrow confines of the following primer, but some of the ideas/thinkers presented here are essential building blocks for what will follow.
What is ontology? What better way to start an unaccredited online course from a flaky blog than to use Wikipedia as a beginning point! At the end of the course, we’ll revisit Wiki’s page and see if we can help it out–that would be meeting the true spirit of this endeavor. After you’ve perused the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, treat yourself to SUNY’s own primer to ontology (follow the link “History of Ontology” at the top of the page to the “History of Ontology” link at the bottom of the page), which will make you like, at least ten times smarter.
Read up on Aristotle (follow the link “History of Ontology” at the top of the page to the “Aristotle” link). As far as we know, Aristotle seems to have initiated philosophical thinking.
Are you familiar with Occam’s Razor? If not, read on!
Surely you’ve come across Descartes’ ridiculous proof of existence–cogito ergo sum–but it couldn’t hurt to brush up on why you may actually exist.
Once you’ve perused the above, no doubt you’ll be primed for all kinds of mad knowledge. Feel free to post comments and questions, or to email me at biblioklept.ed@gmail.com. And if you’re a real go-getter, get a jump start on next week’s assignment, Ways of Seeing.
Biblioklept 