If you are interested in pure math/theoretical physics any philosophy class will be a great choice. Philosophy is much easier than other arts and humanities stuff where reason and logic are totally screwed up.

As a math major for me personally this class is great and provided me with sights into a closely related field of study to math. I decide to take more philosophy classes from here.

For Dr. DeWitt, she is definitely a field expert. Her STEM background is noticeable as she got her bio bachelor from UChicago. If you are a STEM major but have to take an arts&humanities GE, DON'T MESS HER.

Professor Dewitt is not the most engaging professor and the lectures are super boring. There is no attendance req for this class, two papers each worth %40 and %10 of your grade is 5 reflection papers. The class heavily depends on how the TA grades the papers since the professor doesn't even bother discussing paper grades with you. The TA (Ayana) was one of toughest graders ever and her way of grading is due to most students not showing up to her sections (the sections are optional). I do not recommend taking this class at all if you want to keep a good GPA!!!

I took this class as a GE (biochem major). I had some prior experience with philosophical writing and am convinced that this helped substantially, as the schedule was super crammed and I didn't get much feedback on the papers that I submitted (more later). My TA was super helpful and attending his office hours proved to be very helpful, as he would usually give us concrete essay tips (i.e. tell us what we should include to get our paper from a B to an A).

Prof. split the final exam into three 'examlets,' which took place after we had finished the material for the philosopher we were studying. In total, the three exams were worth 24% of our final grade. I found them fairly straightforward, as the answers to ~80-85% of the questions could be found almost verbatim in the lecture notes. The remaining ~15-20% required a little bit more critical thinking (basically applying the theory, making inferences etc.). Even though I didn't do any of the reading, I found answering the inference questions manageable. Overall, if you read through the lecture notes and make brief notes right before the examlet, you will do fine. Prof. explicitly described these examlets as exams that test our comprehension — therefore, there are no trick questions, which was very helpful.

The three papers are worth the majority of the final grade. Although I found the length to be reasonable (3-4 pages, ~1000-1200 words), the crammed schedule prevented our TAs from giving us feedback on our second paper before submitting our final paper. This basically meant that for many students, they wrote their first philosophy paper ever, received some feedback and then wrote two papers without any additional feedback. Although it goes without saying that times during the pandemic are unpredictable, I genuinely believe that this prevented me from getting the most out of the course.

Having taken the TOK course in High School (IB student), I had some experience with the type of thinking that we were required to do when answering the paper prompts — and I believe that this carried me. ***For students with no prior experience with philosophy and philosophical writing, I would think twice before signing up for this class, as some of the material that you are expected to know goes beyond what I would classify as 'introductory.'***

The final part of the grade (6%) is comprised of 3 reaction papers, which are graded on completion. For these, you basically choose a section of the text that stands out and then write your response to it.

Final Notes:
- I signed up for this class thinking that it would be an easy A. It turned out, however, that it was more difficult to obtain this grade than I initially thought. The crammed schedule that limited the amount of essay feedback that I received certainly increased the difficulty.
- Although Prof. was engaged during her lectures and frequently made jokes and answered questions, she basically was just reading off of a document that she was screensharing. This document was also posted on CCLE (which was helpful while reviewing for the examlets and writing the papers), meaning that attending lectures wasn't vital.
- While I think that the online format certainly didn't help Prof.'s ability to go through course material, I genuinely think she could have put more effort into adapting to the current norm (i.e. creating more engaging lectures by making use of breakout rooms, etc.) When I signed up for this course, I was expecting to learn a lot from discussions about interesting ethical questions. Although we did have such conversations in our discussion sections, the one-way flow of information during lectures was underwhelming.

I have many concerns regarding Janelle DeWitt and how she conducted herself in class. She has narrow ideas about what is valid and good scholarship. Unfortunately, this view seemed to be affected by the race and gender of the students. More than once she chose to ignore the pronouns requested by the transgender student in class. The most alarming was her racially insensitive and bias statements on non-western thought. Besides this, she is inconsistent with her grading and provides zero explanation for it. In this class you either conform and agree with her or be outcasted. I received the grade I wanted but it wasn't easy swallowing and witnessing the racial aggressions so I will not be taking another philosophy class with J. Dewitt. I suggest fellow POC to stay clear of her as well.

Dewitt relishes in making her course harder than they need to be. I am a fourth year philosophy major and have never experienced someone as obnoxious in their delight of making their students struggle.

She had issues in her personal life, which I was completely sympathetic of. However, it resulted in a horribly unorganized quarter. Although we were expected to be understanding of her circumstances she was in no way considerate of student time or lives. She made up deadlines and was unwavering in her idiotic scheduling of things. You would think that since she was effectively screwing us with posting lectures late, or not at all at time, that she would reflect that with flexibilities with deadlines but instead we had to assume the consequences of her failures. This class should not have been difficult but she lost control very early on and made it exponentially worse.

In addition, she within her lectures I often found myself cringing at her lack of compassion or awareness on many social issues. I am not sensitive or overly politically correct but she was on the verge of spewing overtly racist nonsense daily.

Overall would say to just avoid her if possible, not a caring teacher nor an efficient lecturer.

I don’t know if I would consider this class an “easy GE,” but it is definitely manageable! Your main homework consists of reading moral theories (which can be long & confusing at times) and different philosophers’ takes on moral issues. We wrote a total of three essays, and they’re pretty well spaced out so it doesn’t feel like a crushing amount of work. If the tests weren’t open note there would be a fair bit of studying, so that may change as the class moves back to being in person. Overall was an interesting class that I would definitely take again!

Overall, the class was fairly interesting and a good intro-level philosophy class. I don't really have any complaints, except that a lot of the readings were concentrated at the end of the quarter. That being said, I was able to do fine on the final exam and paper without thoroughly reading through everything. Just make sure to be familiar with the content on the prof's screen shares, which contain both the main points of the assigned readings and her takes on those points.

Although this class is somewhat interesting, it was much harder than it needed to be because of the professor and TA. The lectures were so confusing and the Professor read verbatim off of the notes so attending lecture gave no further insight or help. The TA I had was also super unhelpful and the grading between TA's was very inconsistent. Overall I would choose a different philosophy class if you can and would not recommend this class.

Overall, Professor DeWitt is a nice person but her lectures were kinda unclear and this was a pretty light-workload class. If you're gonna do the readings, I'd take this class.

During lecture, she went over screenshares of a word doc with notes on it about the topic (Bentham, Kant, abortion, death penalty, gun control, etc.) Some parts were helpful, but when she tried to explain things in further detail, she'd repeat things but not concisely so they didn't make sense; it was like she was trying to explain it well by talking more but it didn't help that much.

The weighting sucked, I wish we had more padding assignments and that the final paper wasn't weighted 35% of the grade because philosophy is a hard class. TBH I didn't do any of the readings beforehand like we were supposed to so that may factor into why I was confused during lecture all the time. The mcq tests were also super easy because they were open note.

What I like about Professor DeWitt is that she was very clear that we could just email our TA for extensions on the papers, stating that in emails and in the prompt documents, and you don't really need a good excuse either, so I used all the 1-2 day extension opportunities. I got B- average on my papers, but to be honest I did them all last minute and I didn't really understand the concepts as well as I could've.

There was no collaboration in lectures, and only once or twice did we have to collaborate with others during discussion section.

Concepts were pretty vague and subjective, so it was hard to wrap my mind around things. I took this class as a pre-major req and because I wanted to find a good framework of morality for me to use in life, but I don't think it was that helpful in the latter aspect. I still managed to get a B+ even though I didn't prioritize this class, so I guess take this class if you are interested in learning about old philosophy ideas and their application on modern topics.

Speaking from the perspective of someone with very little interest in philosophy taking this class as a GE, I would probably advise against taking this class. The material covered didn't interest me at all and I found myself dozing off a lot. However, DeWitt is definitely a good professor who interacts with the class a lot and is really good at communicating the material. The class is also fairly forgiving as long as you attend lecture or get help from your TA since the grade was mostly dependent on 2 papers and a pretty easy final.