News
Class
| lecture | ||
| Time | Mon | Fri |
| 16:30 - 17:50 | 12:00 - 13:20 | |
| Instructor | YAN Min | |
| Office | 3487 | |
| Phone | 23587442 | |
Course Material
Web Sites
Course Description
Critical thinking means always think wider and deeper. Wider means always think, no matter how obvious or trivial the matter is. Deeper means always think twice, or more times, beyond the first instinct.
We master the critical thinking skill by learning and practising. We learn from the great thinkers in the past, starting with Socrates. We also learn the thinking method, mainly the scientific method. Then we practise by applying what we learned to real matters.
Both learning and practising requires the active participation of students. I will suggest possible topics and sources, and introduce the key ideas, and have a preliminary discussion. The students learn the rest by reading (and listening, and watching) by themselves. Then they report to the class what they learned. We follow their report by more discussion.
Given the limited class time, the learning in the class can only be extremely introductory, and students must explore further, much beyond the materials in the class. For the practising, I will suggest broad categories (holy ideas, news, statistical fallacy, etc) and the students are supposed to search for such categories in everyday life and online news. At the end, we learn to pick any item, critically examine the item, and make our judgement in the most rational way.
Note
There are no exams or essays. The final grade is based on everyday performance. There are three possible grades: Distinction, Pass, Fail.
The syllabus is subject to change as circumstances arise.