Presentation in Class:
The presentation in class can be with or without a PowerPoint. It is a draft of your research paper shared. The goal is to have your classmates comment and to inspire you to take your ideas to another level. To add the personal if missing as well as augment the conceptual.
This may be a 10% change in your argument and content or 30% or more. There is no bar. It is your reflection on the course and what you have learned.
Research paper (7 pages):
Caputos conclusion to his book is to let TRUTH be, to let it lead so we can follow. We never know what TRUTH will do next, nor can anyone dictate to TRUTH how it is supposed to behave. (p. 244) His book ends with a plea for the reader to accept a postmodern faith. (p. 257 ff.)
For Caputo, truth and religion in modernity, is another face to the debate between faith and reason. His answer is a new Enlightenment (p. 10). His method is a hermeneutic or postmodern theory of TRUTH that accepts the choasmic play of multiple and competing interpretations of the world (p. 18)what he calls changing with the changed (p. 19) [Should we think Bob Dylan—times they are changing?]
The many hermeneutic faces of the debate between faith and reason are only one side of the coin in this course. The reflective. The other side is the creative. How we express ourselves creatively —- through mediums such as art, writing and music in shaping that debate. Reading Tich Nath Hahn, we encountered how fear inhibits creativity.
Using Kuhns idea of paradigm shifts (pp. 224 232 in Caputos book Truth), write a 7 page essay that addresses how your creative experience (e.g., vision board, writing, music, meditation, yoga) assisted you to reflect on faith and reason, truth. Complement your essay with selections from your readings.
***One guide to understanding paradigm shift is re-reading Caputos discussion of the fertility of Kuhns concept with regard to art and our construction of what it means (truth) -When Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal in 1917 and declared it a piece of art, he effected a paradigm shift in contemporary art, or (and this is even more revealing), changed the rules of the art game (Wittgenstein—British philosopher) or recast our interpretative frame (hermeneutics—framework to interpret).
