PHIL250 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Harjit Bhogal PHIL250 Anonymous 02/24/2023	Good teacher, lecturer, and understanding. Graded fairly and allows you to improve on essays. Overall a great chad.
Harjit Bhogal PHIL250 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/28/2022	Love this class. It may be a bit hard to get an A because there are very few categories but he gives you a lot of chances to do well. The class grade is broken down into 20% for participation, 20% for first paper, 40% for second paper, and 20% for the final. For participation, talking a few times in class is enough for an A and I personally talked a lot more so I do not know the threshold for an A vs. an A- or lower but it is wise to at least contribute a few times a week to be very safe. For first and second paper, he gives you a chance to revise the paper twice meaning you submit is once, he gives comments and a grade. You can edit it and submit again for more comments and a grade and then do this again, one last time. This means 2 revisions for both papers, 4 total which is very generous. The final was also not too bad so fairly easy to get an A. Overall, he's a wonderful professor and you will enjoy every class, guaranteed. Take this class or any other class with him if you get a chance, you will not regret it.
Harjit Bhogal PHIL250 Anonymous 11/08/2022	The class itself is pretty moderate, But Harjit himself is a person you'll enjoy hearing lectures from. I understand why he would give a 20% participation grade to the class. But it's very worth your time participating, since his lectures are very interesting and understandable. You can't go wrong with Harjit, this guy is like your Doctor Strange in the philosophy world.
Mathias Frisch PHIL250 Expecting a B Anonymous 02/05/2011	It would be an understatement to say that this course has changed the way I look at the scientific method and everything in the natural world. I came into the course, a skeptic of philosophy and its uses. I leave now, still a skeptic in some form, but certainly able to see the importance in assessing scientific processes using philosophical methods. This is one of the few classes I have taken, that I would recommend to every single student on campus. If you are a creationist or climate skeptic waiting for that one moment when you're 40 years old to “look at the evidence”, do it now. If you are a stubborn logical empiricist as I once was, and cannot think of any reason why science may not be uniform, please take this course. You are embarrassing your own philosophy and science as well. Now, only if I could somehow get my creationist father, who thinks “evolution is only a theory” to take this course... Lectures, depending on the philosophical view, can be either extremely interesting, or some slightly sleep-inducing. For instance, some parts of lectures concerning the history with the logical empiricist views could have been better. Or maybe what is boring is the history itself. And the feminist critique of science seemed to drag on a bit more than even the feminists can take. But other than that, lectures were excellent, made doubly so by his act of posting them on ELMS. The main textbook, Theory and Realty was easy to keep up with, with author's wit and expertise engaging the reader. It also proved extremely helpful for examinations. However, I felt that the professor may have dwelt too much on Kuhn's “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. As landmark as I think the book was in its time and ours, I don't see any reason why Kuhn's model had to be given more thought to than, say, any of the later philosophers. Maybe I'm biased: Kuhn is an extremely boring and inefficient writer. He makes a lot of interesting cases, but the book could have sufficed with less pages. I should add, the monumental task of getting the students to read 8 chapters of Kuhn in a week is intimidating. W.W.K.D? What would Kuhn Do? Weekly ELMS quizzes encouraged us all to keep up with the readings. Quizzes were fairly easy, with maybe 5 difficult questions in 4 distinct quizzes (4 questions each). Two exams are given: a midterm and a final. Professor and teaching assistant, Lisa L. makes sure that we take either exam fully prepared. I have not been to Frisch's office hours, but I have friends say that he is willing to devote a good amount of his time to making sure that you understand the material. They are also highly responsive to E-mail, although Lisa, the TA was about 10 times quicker and more responsive in replying to E-mails. So, if in doubt, send the email by Lisa. Lisa also seemed to take a load off in writing the final paper. She had kept office hours, and read through copies of drafts, and finished papers. In discussion sessions, she helped clarify the more difficult concepts.

Harjit Bhogal
PHIL250

Anonymous
02/24/2023

Good teacher, lecturer, and understanding. Graded fairly and allows you to improve on essays. Overall a great chad.

Harjit Bhogal
PHIL250

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/28/2022

Love this class. It may be a bit hard to get an A because there are very few categories but he gives you a lot of chances to do well. The class grade is broken down into 20% for participation, 20% for first paper, 40% for second paper, and 20% for the final. For participation, talking a few times in class is enough for an A and I personally talked a lot more so I do not know the threshold for an A vs. an A- or lower but it is wise to at least contribute a few times a week to be very safe. For first and second paper, he gives you a chance to revise the paper twice meaning you submit is once, he gives comments and a grade. You can edit it and submit again for more comments and a grade and then do this again, one last time. This means 2 revisions for both papers, 4 total which is very generous. The final was also not too bad so fairly easy to get an A. Overall, he's a wonderful professor and you will enjoy every class, guaranteed. Take this class or any other class with him if you get a chance, you will not regret it.

Harjit Bhogal
PHIL250

Anonymous
11/08/2022

The class itself is pretty moderate, But Harjit himself is a person you'll enjoy hearing lectures from. I understand why he would give a 20% participation grade to the class. But it's very worth your time participating, since his lectures are very interesting and understandable. You can't go wrong with Harjit, this guy is like your Doctor Strange in the philosophy world.

Mathias Frisch
PHIL250

Expecting a B
Anonymous
02/05/2011

It would be an understatement to say that this course has changed the way I look at the scientific method and everything in the natural world. I came into the course, a skeptic of philosophy and its uses. I leave now, still a skeptic in some form, but certainly able to see the importance in assessing scientific processes using philosophical methods. This is one of the few classes I have taken, that I would recommend to every single student on campus. If you are a creationist or climate skeptic waiting for that one moment when you're 40 years old to “look at the evidence”, do it now. If you are a stubborn logical empiricist as I once was, and cannot think of any reason why science may not be uniform, please take this course. You are embarrassing your own philosophy and science as well. Now, only if I could somehow get my creationist father, who thinks “evolution is only a theory” to take this course... Lectures, depending on the philosophical view, can be either extremely interesting, or some slightly sleep-inducing. For instance, some parts of lectures concerning the history with the logical empiricist views could have been better. Or maybe what is boring is the history itself. And the feminist critique of science seemed to drag on a bit more than even the feminists can take. But other than that, lectures were excellent, made doubly so by his act of posting them on ELMS. The main textbook, Theory and Realty was easy to keep up with, with author's wit and expertise engaging the reader. It also proved extremely helpful for examinations. However, I felt that the professor may have dwelt too much on Kuhn's “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. As landmark as I think the book was in its time and ours, I don't see any reason why Kuhn's model had to be given more thought to than, say, any of the later philosophers. Maybe I'm biased: Kuhn is an extremely boring and inefficient writer. He makes a lot of interesting cases, but the book could have sufficed with less pages. I should add, the monumental task of getting the students to read 8 chapters of Kuhn in a week is intimidating. W.W.K.D? What would Kuhn Do? Weekly ELMS quizzes encouraged us all to keep up with the readings. Quizzes were fairly easy, with maybe 5 difficult questions in 4 distinct quizzes (4 questions each). Two exams are given: a midterm and a final. Professor and teaching assistant, Lisa L. makes sure that we take either exam fully prepared. I have not been to Frisch's office hours, but I have friends say that he is willing to devote a good amount of his time to making sure that you understand the material. They are also highly responsive to E-mail, although Lisa, the TA was about 10 times quicker and more responsive in replying to E-mails. So, if in doubt, send the email by Lisa. Lisa also seemed to take a load off in writing the final paper. She had kept office hours, and read through copies of drafts, and finished papers. In discussion sessions, she helped clarify the more difficult concepts.

Reviews for PHIL250