overview:
CoreNavigating the site:
is a cyber-place
to begin your study in my classes.
Here are threads to understand that each course is layered with a progression from basic to complex information.
We begin by clarifying basic information that defines the scope, breadth and depth of our inquiry. We progress to the different ways to organize information and build arguments.
Then we inquire, in some depth, about competing evidence for different arguments so that we may eventually reflect on what we know.
This last stage of evaluating stems from active reflection and is to enable us to create an informed discussion of the human responsibility for knowledge, for serving one another and for protecting essential natural areas. We do this active examination of arguments to evaluate how effective we are at providing each other with the necessary means to protect the earth because nature renders indispensable services to maintain life.
These naturally derived gratuities are called ecosystem services. People are not truly free unless they recognize our interdependence on these services.
Survival kit for classes.
C O R E
These
intersecting lines represent the relations that exist among important
ideas, which like keystones hold the structure of our knowledge together.
They recall for us Ralph Waldo Emerson's concept of rays of relation that knit together the seen and unseen worlds we inhabit. Rays of relation extend from one thing to another so that reasonable people see how people, places and things are derived from one another, exist independently from one another, or cause one another to exist. John Muir, who was greatly influenced my Emerson reformulated these "rays of relation" when he suggested that when we examine any one item we discover that "everything is hitched to everything else."
- Ought we to do anything?
- What is the point of what you know?
- How do you make an argument of the evidence?
- When the facts contradict opinions!
- The importance of doubt.
- What is a necessary condition for events to be true?
- What is a sufficient cause for something to occur?
- causes
- underlying
- intermediate
- proximate
- ultimate (teleology) end
- How well to we know the facts?
- What is worth preserving for posterity?
- How much is enough?
