<p>This is meant to be a thread for philosophy majors (and other students who have taken UCLA Philosophy classes) to post their experiences in the department. </p>
<p>i.e provide a list of professors and T.As to avoid or to take, name any classes/subjects worth taking or avoiding, and possibly provide some tips or resources for students to do well in specific philosophy classes.</p>
<p>To all who contribute, thanks :)</p>
<p>Here are Beyphy’s suggestions:</p>
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<p>Also just a suggestion for anyone interested in Philosophy, not just for majors (but minors as well), look around other departments that teach philosophy courses. I took a 19th Century German Philosophy class taught by McCumber and it only appears in the Germanic Languages department (it is definitely a philosophy course and it is taught in English) in the registrar when registering for classes. If you like metaphysics and Nietzsche, Hegel, and Marx etc it is an amazing class. The class only had ~20 students and it was very personal, very discussion based, and all around an amazing experience for me (very liberal arts small class feel). I am glad I found the gem of a class in an outside department. The class itself was smaller than all of my classes and even their respective discussion sections. I’m not sure which other departments offer courses like these that are separate from the actual philosophy department, but they might be worth looking into. Often times they focus on philosophy of the region that pertains to the department. It’s just another option to look into that I highly recommend.</p>
<p>Continental:
Since most main philosophy departments are analytic, you’ll have to look in specialized sub-departments to get non-analytic (e.g. continental) stuff. So German departments might teach courses in Hegel, Heidegger, etc. and French departments might teach classes in Sartre or Foucault. </p>
<p>Classics:
It also wouldn’t be unusual to find philosophy classes in departments like classics. My former latin professor taught a class on Augustine’s Confessions last fall, and i think that they routinely teach Plato and Aristotle in the Greek classes.</p>
<p>Linguistics:
Since philosophy also has many close ties with linguistics, some departments (e.g. MIT) have merged their phil./ling. departments. You can find some interesting classes that are very philosophical, like questions of being, in linguistics departments.</p>
<p>Religious studies:
for classes dealing with various topics in religion (i.e. theology) you can find some topics in religious studies. However, i don’t think they deal with any of the really substantive problems in philosophy of religion (e.g. the ontological argument, theodicy, etc.)</p>
<p>Please make a “A Potential Guide for UCLA Economics Majors”, hope anyone can help…</p>
<p>Political Science 116B is a continental philosophy class.</p>
<p>Come to think of it, the political theory concentration in political science is pretty ideal for people who dislike analytical philosophy.</p>
<p>Math 114L (Mathematical Logic) and Math 114C (Computability Theory) are also somewhat related to Philosophy, though on the other end of the spectrum from anything Continental.</p>
<p>If I remember correctly, the most famous professors are Kaplan, Herman, Burge, Almog, Parsons, Almog and Martin. Obviously fame alone won’t make someone a great teacher, but it seems to transfer better in a subject like philosophy.</p>
<p>As for general tips for doing well, you should have a solid understanding of logic. If conditional statements or the exact meaning of logical implication confuse you, it could be a problem. </p>
<p>Also, as you’re likely to going to have less supplementary readings than in other subjects, getting the most out of lecture is very important. That means you have to follow what’s being said, you have to get a reasonable understanding what’s going on as it happens, and you’ll probably want good notes so that you can go back over what was said when you reach a point of confusion. Improving your note taking skills will likely come in very handy.</p>
<p>Lastly, each class probably covers a certain set of questions. You’ll probably want to know what those questions are, including the various subtleties of the question (not as trivial as it might sound, depending on the class) and perhaps more importantly which parts aren’t at all subtle (lest you waste time and energy on trying to figure out unimportant distinctions). If you’re looking at various answers, it may be worth keeping in mind motivations for answering the question. Each argument will likely rely on a different set of assumptions, so you might want to figure out what those assumptions are and what the important ones are. If there are a variety of issues involved, the simple order in which those issues are dealt with as well as the importance a person assigns to the various issues (might not be the same order) could have an impact on the final conclusion. It could be helpful to try to figure out how that matters, if it matters.</p>
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<p>Thanks for letting me know about these. The only one i knew about was one that you didn’t mention: the Set Theory course. This is huge historically in philosophy because Bertrand Russell was able to show that he was able to derive a contradiction in Frege’s Basic Law V (now known as Russell’s paradox.) As a result, he pretty much destroyed Frege’s attempt to reduce arithmetic into logic. (which was basically his lifes work.)</p>
<p>Overall, i’ve read quite a bit of people like Frege, Hilbert, Peano, Cantor, and Godel. I’ve also read a small bit about Turing, and i know that Church was a professor in UCLA’s philosophy department. So it would be nice to take a class or two on them (since it seems fairly hard to have a substantive conversation about logic with any undergrad in the philosophy department.)</p>
<p>This also helps me better understand the differences between mathematical and philosophical logic. I’m still not completely sure about the distinction, but i suppose i can associate set theory, model theory, and proof theory with mathematical logic, and associate modal logic and second-order logic with philosophical logic.</p>
<p>For what’s it worth 114C was offered last year and so won’t be offered this year and might not be offered next year. 114L will be offered in the spring, but I think it’s offered close to every year.</p>