Overview: How do the authors you’re examining answer compelling worldview questions or challenge worldview answers? Using at least one text from the normative tradition (Homer, Plato, Dante, Frankenstein) and at least one text from the diagnostic tradition (Marx, Nietzsche, and Kundera), compare and contrast worldviews (how the authors tend to answer philosophical questions), including their essential defining characteristics, their assets, and their contradictions. In the inventory you may also examine your own worldview in relation to the texts.
This is not an evaluative competition. You are not putting your world view in a boxing ring with Nietzsche to see who is left standing. You want to show you understand, using evidence from the texts, that thinkers answer world view questions differently (think Marx’s historical materialism, the Base/Superstructure relationship) and how those answers have different effects on a culture.
Purpose: your purpose is twofold, to inform and to convince. You are writing to inform your audience of your helpful interpretative insights. You also want those insights to be convincing, with sound and supported interpretive claims.
Audience: you are writing to people like yourself, those who have read the texts, but have not necessarily had the time to do the thoughtful, in-depth interpretation that you are offering them. Think of yourselves in solidarity doing various deep dives into the literature.
What is a worldview? Simply put, how an individual or a culture views the world or universe. A worldview includes “truth” claims, beliefs, values and attitudes about the nature of reality. Worldviews generally include explanations of the categories below to varying degrees of comprehensiveness.
World View Categories: The following categories and their accompanying questions help to examine worldviews. Use the following chart to determine your paper’s focus. You may focus on one or multiple world view categories and questions. There will not be time to move linearly through all categories and questions, so choose a focus that interests you. This list of categories and questions is not exhaustive so feel free to address other appropriate inventory questions.
Epistemology: beliefs about the nature and sources of knowledge; 1. How do we determine of something is true?
- What are the sources of those truth claims?
- Are truths eternal? Situational? Singular? Multiple?
- How do humans know what they know?
- Is there a knowledge hierarchy present in the worldview, say a preference for sensate or empirical knowledge over ideational or transcendent knowledge?
- What is true in the worldview and is the truth situational, culturally constructed, or universal?
- What are the scientific methods?
Cosmology: beliefs about the origins and nature of the universe, life, and especially humans; 1. What brings order to the universe? - Why is there sometimes chaos?
- Is the universe just? Uncaring? Unconscious? Do people get what they deserve based on forces greater than them? Or is justice a human construct?
- Is the universe immanent (immanence) meaning that there is nothing possible outside the material universe?
- Or is there transcendent things, like gods or forms that exist outside of the material universe?
Theology: beliefs about religions and the existence and nature of Gods; 1. What does the worldview say about gods? Religion? - Do the gods have free will (the ability to have chosen otherwise)?
- Is there a conception of the afterlife? What happens when human’s die? Is it different than when other animals die?
- To what extant does the idea of an afterlife effect one’s decisions and outlook in life?
- What are the god’s relationship to morality, justice, and ethics?
Axiology: beliefs about the nature of value, what is good and bad, what is right and wrong. 1. Are there clear good/bad demarcations? - How are good/bad/evil determined?
- Is the concept of evil relevant and what is its nature (humans, natural world, and gods)?
- What is just (Justice) in the worldview? Who is responsible for justice? Humans? Gods? Individuals? Societies? A mixture?
- What is the extent of moral consideration? Individuals? Family? Friends? Town? City? Country? Likeminded people with shared values? Everyone in the world? Other animals? Other species?
- Are there contradictions between how morality theorized and how it is applied?
- Are there dualistic values hierarchies present (heaven/earth, man/women, soul/body, gods/man, reason/emotion, etc.)?
Metaphysics: beliefs about the ultimate nature of Reality; 1. Is anything stable and permanent? What is fixed? What is changing? - What is the nature of the relationship between mind & body? Are they the same separate?
- What is the reality of the soul?
- What are humans capable of understanding or not understanding about reality?
Teleology: beliefs about the meaning and purpose of the universe, its inanimate elements, and its inhabitants; 1. Does life, nature, the universe, the gods, humans have a purpose? - Are purposes fixed? Malleable?
- Do things happen for a reason? Do we determine the reason? Is the reason determined for us?
Anthropology: beliefs about the nature and purpose of Man in general and, oneself in particular. 1. Does humanity have a “nature”? - Do humans have free will?
- Do humans have control of their life scripts? Some control? Full control. No control?
- Do all humans have inalienable rights? Do other animals? Other species?
Discursive Materialism: Instead of focusing on how things “really” are or should be, we attend to how truth and morality are established, negotiated, maintained, and challenged in discourse. So, for example, the question of whether morality is absolute or culturally relative is put aside in favor of an analysis of how morality is invoked and negotiated in discourse. 1. Address the process by which cultural meanings are produced and understood. - Focus on how social realities are linguistically/discursively constructed.
- Be conscious of the context-bound nature of discourse.
Requirements & Structure
Structure Requirements
Action • Begin with an interesting hook such as a personal narrative, an engaging story, a compelling quotation or umbrella question.
Background/Context • Announce you texts and focus—your categorical questions up for discussion. (See charts).
• Define important terms using credible sources (https://plato.stanford.edu/)
• Establish the difference between the intellectual conversation and the doxa conversation, what most people take for granted in a culture.
Development • Using the texts, explain the major concepts of the worldviews up for examination. Feel free to integrate worldviews instead of addressing them separately.
• When you make claims about the text or the authors, support it with primary textual evidence.
• Compare and contrast worldviews, with the option to including your own.
• Discover and explain assets (what is the value) and contradictions in the worldviews.
• What problem do the worldviews attempt to address and solve?
• What problems does the worldview give rise to?
• Offer any insight into why aspects of the world view changed.
• What does you get out of the worldview? Order? Freedom? Stability? Love from others?
• Integrate some version of Kundera’s characters into your development. The Foundationalists (Normative traditions), Tereza and Franz and the Anti-foundationalists: Tomas and Sabina. This should help you articulate the worldviews as you read about these characters negotiating meaning in a social world of intimate relationship categories.
Climax • Optional: If you haven’t already, explain what the inventory has made you consider about you own worldview.
Dialectics. What are the synthesis possibilities?
The thesis is an intellectual proposition.
The antithesis is a critical perspective on the thesis.
The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.
Or is this a Dialogical situation? Is this situation more open to multiple truths and perspectives?
Ending • Where do we go from here?
• What are the next questions to ask?
• What do you see happening in the future regarding your topic?