Excellent class! Hsu was the most approachable professor I've taken yet, and always seemed willing to discuss the material in depth with students after class, whether clarifying or exploring new issues. You need to take this class seriously though, but if you do the prerequisites, going to lecture and discussion and finishing the reading (and there's not that much), then it will definitely help. This is the kind of stuff you just need to give time. And sure he may seem to belabor points at times, but think of it as an open guideline on how to do philosophy, and listening closely you can learn a lot from the detailed approach of his thought process.

Overall it was a pretty good class. There's one midterm that's a take home essay, a take home essay final, and in class all worth 1/3 of your grade. Very little reading. Bassicly the whole quarter was on Descartes meditations with a few pages here and there of other people's comments on the issues Descartes raises. Hsu is nice and English accent is entertaining, but the most important thing in this class is to get to know your TA who will be grading all your work. It is a very detail driven and whole class periods can go on about a paragraph or two in Descartes. I'm sure that can get a little boring but for people like me who aren't philosophy majors it was handy. Hard class to get an A in, but an A- is doable. Hardest thing about this class is getting used to writing essay in the backwards unequivocal philosophy style. My TA told us that he didn't want us to use more than 14 words per sentence, and that if we wrote an introduction or conclusion he wouldn't read it. Tough grading scale, but very little work.

This class was a major disappointment. The exams were excruciating (the average on the multiple choice for the 2nd midterm was less that half correct, you be the judge)... and everything was graded harshly on top of that. Hsu was a good speaker but had a tendency to make a 15 minute lecture into a 2-hour one. I would not recommend his class. It would not have been so bad if there was a participation grade or something, but there is nothing to cushion your grades. I got a B+ and I worked VERY hard for it.

very nice guy but PAINFULLY BORING class. lecture is way longer than it has to be and the material is a little abstract.

Boring lectures, but the midterm & final are pretty much based on it. Not much reading (the book is tiny) and the pace is slow. Section was incredibly helpful.

Ridiculously repetitive and boring lecture. He gives out the midterm questions before the exam and the TA's give you the answers in OHs. I stopped going to lecture after the first week and stuck with section. Final was take home. Overall, almost no work and I got a really easy A.

Hsu was a compelling lecturer, but he would spend 2 hours exhausting a point that really would take only 20 minutes to make fully and completely. Sometimes in this class I got to feeling like I had to do philosophy on his terms and not my own, which isn't fun; he was so steadfastly anti-Descartes that, if you didn't take a step back and create your own view of the material, you had to wonder "why on earth was this canonized as a great work of philosophy?"

Philosophy 21 Professor Hsu - Winter 03

This class was the hardest class I've ever taken. Not because the exams were difficult, but because the subject matter tested on was extremly abstract and didn't flow from the lectures. The lectures were ramblings that could have been summarized in a 15 minutes time frame, instead of the hour and fourty minutes wasted. Professor Hsu is a nice man, but an awful teacher and the TAs, especially Sachin Pai, are not effective communicators. I felt even more lost after section. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS!

I feel I owe it to the people who are signing up for this class to give them the other side, because at this point all people have done is sing the praises of Prof. Hsu's ability to articulate the subtlties of philosophy. For non-philosophy majors, it is boring as hell.

I'm a fourth year philosophy major, and love the subject, but in approximately a two hundred person class, it was always about half full, and at least 10-15 people were sleeping. On any given day at any given time, this was the case, and of the remaining people, there were probably 15 people paying attention and the others were reading newspapers or doing other homework. Be prepared to be bored, because for the first five weeks you just go over four pages of Descartes 1st meditation, which as far as philosophy goes, is blindingly easy. He is slow, and deliberate and I kid you not, spent more than an hour one time pondering over whether or not he could be incorrigible about his socks being blue or black. This you can deal with, just really try to pay attention and listen for value because it does have a point. If you can't listen for value, then don't take this class because you have to seek it out.

However, the real problem comes in with the midterms and the final, because although you can summarize the content of the entire course in approximately a page, UCLA tends towards an analytic style of philosophy, which means you can't just say things the way a reasonable, intelligent person would, you have to put it in a complex, formulaic method that looks sort of like, "Descartes is incorrigble about a proposition P, IFF P is true [necessarily] every time it is put forward by him, otherwise he could not be incorrigible about P." The problem is, there is absolutely NO instruction on how to write this way unless you have an exceptionally kind TA (yay for Joe Hwang!)who will sit down and explain all the intricacies of this mysterious, mandatory system. My suggestion is find out early what your TA looks for, and set up a time to practice this style before 30 or 40% of your grade rests on it. You could fail the class, knowing all the information WELL, if your TA adheres too rigorously to an analytic style and you're unfamiliar with it. Prof. Hsu instructs them to grade you harshly too, so be aware you're being graded by a standard that is probably foreign to you, and harshly at that.

Essentially my breakdown is this - For philosophy majors: This will be a great teacher for an upper division class, he really explains the subtleties and nuances well and I look forward to taking him for a more complex topic. I don't recommend for lower division classes, it stays too simplistic and redundant.
For non-philosophy majors: Find out the style your TA likes and cater to it as much as possible and as early as possible. Pay attention as much as you can and listen for the gold. If you're easily bored or don't like philosophy, don't take this teacher, because most of the class looked bored out of their minds. On a good note, Descartes is probably the easist thing you'll ever do in philosophy.

Phil. 21 was interesting to some extent and Professor Hsu is a very nice man, but what TA you get can make or break everything for you. My TA's name was Dawn Starr and she was an arrogant, egotistical teaching assistant. She suffers from what I would like to call the "yes, but..." syndrome, which is whenever anyone would respond to a question in section it was never the correct answer,and she would have to rephrase the answer in her own words. I did go in to see Hsu on various occasions and he is very willing to talk to his students, but overall I would not recommend this class unless you are a real philosophy buff (I took it as a GE).