YOU NEED TO GO TO CLASS in order to get enough information to write the essays because you will NOT be able to adequately dissect these readings yourself. But the catch is that you need to PAY ATTENTION in class which can be hard because I have def napped in more than one of these lectures. Her voice is very soothing and the material can be boring so at any given moment you will find at least 2 people asleep. Please TAKE GOOD NOTES because you'll use them for the papers and to glance over before your quizzes in section. The readings range in difficulty and annotating the readings never took me less than 1.5-2 hours. Otherwise the class was not bad and discussion was very engaging (thanks to Sam). Philosophical writing is hard and different from other types of writing- so you will probably struggle a bit trying to change your writing style but because it is an intro class everyone is learning alongside you.

The class is ok. There isn't that much reading if you just want to listen to her lectures and not do the assigned readings, but some of the harder concepts may be unclear. The two essays are graded by your TA, I had Saraliza and she was wonderful! The first essay was more about explaining a concept and the second essay is a little more argumentative.

Pretty clear, straightforward class. Your grade consists of three papers and participation. The papers aren't too hard, especially if you go to your TA for help (I had Kyle Scott and he always gave me great advice for my essays). Participation does matter, so you do have to talk sometimes during discussions, not just show up. Again, I had Kyle as a TA, so he considered anything from asking questions during section to giving your own take on a philosopher to going to office hours as participation. There are also pass/no pass quizzes that go into participation that were pretty easy. Dr. Gallagher posts all the possible questions on the slides and pretty much all the answers were on the slides too. As long as you pass three out of the four, you should be fine.

Dr. Gallagher posts readings that you're technically supposed to read before every lecture. However, she explains everything really clearly during lecture so I personally don't think doing every single reading is necessary, just make sure you do the reading for the prompt you're going to write for your papers. She posts slides that have quotes and page numbers on them and I found that super helpful as a guide for writing my papers and citing stuff.

I honestly found discussion more interesting than lecture, just because we were able to discuss and debate the content. Basically, lecture's to help you understand the content in a concise, straightforward way, discussion's then a place for you to give your own interpretation.

Overall, I really did like this class, would definitely recommend taking it.

This class was fine, as it was neither great nor terrible. Grades are based on three essays (ranging from 20-30% each) and participation (25%). Essay grades, as I've heard, vary a decent amount based on your TA, although they do cooperate with grading.

The papers are not very long, as the shortest is 3-4 pages, and the longest is 6-7. There are also assigned readings (not from a textbook), but by the end of the quarter the amount of people doing them... diminished. Her slides cover a lot of the material very well anyway, and she posts them on CCLE.

The topics are fairly interesting, but for some reason I often found myself fighting off sleep in lecture. Even though I was intrigued by some of the philosophers we covered, I couldn't help but find my attention drifting off. After reading the other reviews on here, I am clearly not alone.

If you're interested in philosophy, this isn't a bad choice for a GE, but there may be easier options out there if that's what you're looking for.

People say Dr. Gallagher is a bit on the boring/dry side which is fair but she's also very clear and able to emphasize what she wants you to know. It's more that she can be somewhat repetitive and can have very long trains of thought, but nevertheless many of the topics should be at least decently interesting to the average person.

Among her strengths are that her lectures are extremely organized and, again, she emphasizes the main points that she wants you to know in lecture. This is absolutely critical. If you can force yourself to sustain that attention in class, you can save yourself hours of reading outside of class. What I ended up doing, actually, was to focus my energy on getting everything I could from her lectures and THEN doing the readings AFTER lecture instead of before lecture as suggested because then the readings were a breeze and I could ensure that I was making the connections and reviewing the points she wanted me to know.

The class grading is structured as follows:
Weekly quizzes: 10% - drop lowest 2 out of 9 weeks
Section attendance / participation: 15% - note that both actually count
Midterm 1: 20%
Midterm 2 :20%
Final exam: 35%

Quizzes were simple, 2 questions long and were there just to check that you did the bare minimum. People essentially almost always got 100%.
For attendance/participation, she has a clustered grading scheme where absences are punitive. In other words, it's set up as "0 or 1 absences" "2 absences" and so on as well as outstanding vs excellent vs good vs satisfactory vs unsatisfactory participation. It's somewhat convoluted and she sends an email at the end about it but essentially 1 unexcused absence will not harm you in any way whatsoever, but 2 unexcused absences with "excellent" (outstanding not allowed for 2 unexcused absences) participation automatically sets you back to an A- grade for participation.

Midterm exams were split into Part 1 and Part 2 sections, with Part 1 being multiple choice/short answer. I felt like these were quite straightforward and they were pretty lenient on grading. Part 2 was an essay with a prompt that they gave you beforehand. Going to office hours / review session is very helpful in getting a sense of the direction you want to take - otherwise it's easy to get off track and write an essay that may not meet what they're looking for or falls into some major philosophy traps.

Final exam has an additional Part 3 essay section where you aren't given the prompt beforehand and you must take an ethical stance and defend it on the fly for a case that she sets up for you. I personally felt that the final's Part 1 multiple choice was trickier and I regretted not reading the slides in more depth, something I didn't expect to have to do given that I had already put in a significant amount of effort into knowing each author's arguments quite well and her main points. However, I also ended up doing much better on the final than I had anticipated despite my concerns, and so did others.

Averages for the exams were as follows:
Midterm 1: nearly 87
Midterm 2: 88
Final: 89 (I asked her, as she didn't send a follow-up email as she did for the midterms)

All in all, Dr. Gallagher is a super fair professor and if you ever need help, she will be very patient in ensuring that you have your questions properly answered. This is definitely a decent class to take to fulfill your philosophy/linguistics GE and I also loved having Maddy as my TA :).

Overall a really interesting GE but definitely not the easiest out there. The class requires a lot of reading and although you can get by just paying attention in lectures when it comes time to write the essays you will probably need to go back and read if you want to do well. With that said the lectures were well done in my opinion and I always felt like I got a lot out of them. The papers aren't too long but that can be a challenge of its own.

No amount of caffeine or energy can compete with Dr. Gallagher's gift of compelling an entire lecture to want to fall asleep. Don't get me wrong, the class content is interesting and easy to understand, especially if you have an interest in politics, but the lectures are painful to sit through. Grade is dependent on three essays and four quizzes (not overly complicated). She luckily posts the lecture slides online, so you can easily get a good grade on the essays through a combination of using the slides and reading the passages.

Ok, I have been waiting to write this for a long time. I took this class fall quarte of my freshman year. Dr. Gallagher is the most boring professor I have ever met in my life. Sometimes I had high school days that went from 8 am to 5 pm, going through classes like English Literature, Geography, Chemistry (extremely boring classes) and never, ever was even close to fall asleep. In this class I felt I was about to fall asleep something like 75% of the time. Especially when the person I sat next to was not there. I would go to lecture just to go, because following the lecture is impossible. Everything about the teacher is boring: her voice, her clothes, the way she walks, her face, her everything, unbelievable. Now, I liked the content of the class and found it interesting. I took 3 years of philosophy in high school and liked it so maybe that's also why I didn't find it difficult to understand the material. The readings are interesting too but also incredibly long. I started taking notes on the readings and on the lectures, then I just stopped cause following in class was impossible. cod mobile is a good thing to do if you don't want to fall asleep. The essay prompts are very clear. However, the grading depends on the TAs. I had Kyle Scott, and he was such a good TA. Discussions were useful and he gave really good advice for the essays. Participation matters (25%), you actually have to talk, not just show up. Quizzes are easy and help to the participation grade.

If you don't have to take this class for a requirement I wouldn't recommend it because it is a lot of reading every week, and the material is very dense. Lectures are not terribly engaging. Midterm essays are also graded a bit hard. However, I would say I learned ALOT about important concepts in biomedical ethics which I know will come up in my future. I think it's a useful but quite challenging class.

Professor Gallagher is very passionate about the subject matter which is very clear from the beginning of the class. However, the class is very reading heavy. Lectures are centralized on the readings, and are mostly quotes that are important from the readings. They are posted on CCLE, so lecture could be optional if you don't want to hear her reiterate the slides. There are three essays along with very easy pass/no pass quizzes and participation to make up the total grade. For someone with no experience in philosophy essay writing, the essays were quite hard. However, the TAs and professor really wants to see you succeed and are always there to help.