gannon@MDI.COM (Alden Gannon) (04/19/91)
In article <9104111902.AA17809@cwns10.INS.CWRU.Edu> al885@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Gerard Pinzone) writes: >You need to look at it this way. "I have read some Shakespeare" is >basically equivalent to "I know Newton's three laws of motion". It's >the basic common knowledge of the sciences that are absent in these >liberal arts programs. I must apologize in advance for following-up a non-feminist thread in this newsgroup, but I have read such opinions as this several times in this thread, and can no longer resist comment. I attended a top 10 liberal arts college at which I had very different experiences from these. Philosophy majors would not survive Grinnell College without taking hard science and math (there are no "non-major" tracks in the liberal arts), and Mathematics majors (such as myself) would not survive without a firm grasp of Hegel's dialectic, and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. You haven't experienced the liberal arts until you've just taken an Electromagnetic Theory exam, have to make sense out of the Norman conquest, read 200 pages of Tolstoy, write a 20 page paper on Weber's answer to Marx, and cram for your Computational Complexity exam tomorrow (the *only* class in your major). To reparse your own sentence will suffice to underscore my point: It's the basic common knowledge of the [liberal arts] that are absent in these [science] programs. I contend that Nietzsche's theory of the soul as purality is "common knowledge" in philosophy. Only if you can argue Phenomenology better than I can apply Newton's F=MA will I consider your implication that liberal arts programs are "easier" than "science" programs. I can't think of where to direct the Follow-up, but I know it shouldn't be here. E-mail a rebuttal (if you have one) or suggest a more appropriate forum. [soc.college or talk.philosophy, maybe? I agree, though, unless you can bring relevance back to feminism, this is about as far as it will go here... CTM] -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alden B. Gannon, a.k.a. Zarathustra. INTERNET: gannon%mdi.com@uunet.uu.net "Gotta find a woman be good to me, USENET: ..uunet!mdi.com!gannon Won't hide my liquor, try to serve me tea." --Grateful Dead.