Socrates lives on in CMU classroom

Can one thing really be two?

Snow falls outside of a CMU classroom, dusting the campus in brilliant white. But the students sitting inside that classroom are contemplating an image on the whiteboard, one that is defying their common sense.

“Is it a rabbit or a duck?” Dr. David Hale asks, before answering his own question.

“Both,” he says. “It is reality changed by perception.”

This concept is one of many discussed in Hale’s course, the Philosophy of Science. Tucked away underneath the stairs of the Fine Arts building, the class is comprised of only eight students. Each Thursday, Hale enters the room, leans against the back wall, opens his copy of the textbook fully marked with sticky notes and begins asking questions.

“Well, I think that we don’t often wonder about our place in the world enough because maybe the crush of activities and responsibilities makes life kind of crazy,” Hale said. “Then when you step back and look at the world around us, it’s much more complicated.”

The class seeks to seek, asking questions like, “What is existence?” “Is there an authority administering how to carry out our lives?” “Is science the authority or is it something else?” These questions incite debate within the class, creating an entirely different experience from a normal lecture class.

“Vigorous debate, controversy and discussion. That’s how we learn, through that give and take,” Hale said.

This method of debate teaching began 1,600 years ago with Socrates and his students in Athens, according to the History Channel. Socrates would ask his students to state a thesis, before asking them difficult questions about their theses until they were brought to a contradiction.

“I’m not interested in kids telling me facts and figures on the final paper,” Hale said. “I want them to express their own ideas, what they’ve wrestled with and engaged in over the semester.”

The class began only two weeks ago and students are certainly engaging. For Zack Cesko, an exercise science major, the class has given him perspective in how he thinks about the world around him.

“At one point, everything we believed was Newtonian physics, gravity, philosophy, acceleration,” Cesko said. “Then Einstein came around with his Theory of Relativity, and that was a paradigm shift. Everything changed.”

Hale shoots more questions into the class of eight.

“How absolute is absolute zero since it has never been achieved?”  “Water molecules are too small to be seen, even in a high powered microscope, so how do we know that the ratio of H2O is correct?” According to Hale, we don’t know. We can’t. But that’s not the point.

“As you look at it through different scientific theories, the world becomes more and more intangible,” Hale said. “The more you read about, the more complex it becomes.”

The class discussion continues, drifting in and out of the subjects of inventions, science, relativity and the theoretical as the snow continues to fall. The answers to many questions prove eternally elusive, but the need to discuss these millennium-old queries is irresistible.

Biology major Conor Skurky recommends the course to everyone.

“No matter what your field is, I think that philosophy gives you an advantage,” Skurky said.

Hale asks questions much like a modern Socrates, and the class benefits. According to Hale, philosophy majors not only score higher on grad school entrance exams but also are prepared to think critically for the rest of their lives. To ask, to seek, to debate, that is philosophy. And when applied to the world, mysteries are unearthed and history is made.

“What do all things have in common? Nothing,” Hale said. “There’s not one thing that you and I and this tile and the air and quasars and the black holes and fairy tales have in common.”

Sort of like snowflakes.

mtscofield@mavs.coloradomesa.edu 

Categorised in: Features

This post was written by critedev