Posted: Oct 07, 2019 2:25 am
OlivierK wrote:
It looks like you may be overthinking this. My undergraduate degree (BSc at Sydney, many years ago now) took three years, and consisted of first year subjects (worth 6 "units"), second year subjects (8 units), and third year subjects (12 units). There were requirements to take a certain number of each to reach 70 units, but the usual method was to take 4 first year subjects in your first year (24 units), in second year drop one subject and take continuing second year courses in the other three (24 units), and drop another subject and take 2 third year courses in your third year (24 units = 72 units). It sounds like James' claimed levels might simply correspond to what we called first, second and third year courses.
That at least makes sense, though.
OlivierK wrote:That said, an essay about how humans weren't p-zombies because chocolate factories seems like something that would have been appropriate for Philosophy I, not Philosophy III, and would have been the sort of Philosophy I essay that got a reasonable but not great mark simply by being of roughly the right form, and containing something resembling philosophical argument. Freshers got considerable leeway in the production of pseudo-philosophical arguments, as the view seemed to be that this was, to an extent, simply to be expected from 18-year-olds fresh out of high school. If you can't write wankerish, pseudo-intellectual philosophical essays in first-year uni, then when can you? Deprived of that opportunity, you'd have to find some internet forum with a philosophy section, or something!
This resembles what I said in another thread. It just has the feeling of fresher level undue certainty, not 3rd year 'dot every i with absolute caution'.