Professor
C. Burge
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - This class is NOT easy. I would recommend this course if you are someone who loves Philosophy and CARES to do well. You will be absolutely rewarded in your efforts if you devote a significant amount of time to trying to understand it. Professor Burge warns students on the syllabus about how difficult the course is, and it spans most of the text of the syllabus. The course is about 7 weeks of establishing technical terms and 3 weeks of discussing key arguments in Kant’s “The Critique of Pure Reason.” Lectures take on the style of Professor Burge talking about things that seem highly disconnected until everything comes full circle as you study for your midterm. It is very difficult to sit and devote your full attention to taking notes for 2 hours, hanging on every last word. It is a task with huge cognitive load and the active listening/trying to figure out how to organize concepts in your notes is very difficult. You will find that you and your peers will often take different things from lectures. It is so important to make friends in this class, go to office hours, and come equipped with questions for discussion section. There is no homework! You read “The Critique of Pure Reason” on your own time as well as assigned passages, you don’t really talk about the book in lecture/discussion until the last 3 weeks where you review central arguments. It is not an easy book, but you can get by just reading what is assigned. For the midterm, Professor Burge assigns 9 questions for you to prep/memorize beforehand and then during the midterm he gives you 5 and you pick 3. It is similar for the final except you prep 12-18 questions, he gives you 4, and you pick 3 (all the midterm questions are fair game as well). The writing takes up the full 2 hour period for the midterm & final. The expectation is you spend about 45 minutes per question, and yes, there is that much content to cover in answering the questions. MY SUGGESTION: be organized in your notes from the start. All that said, yes this course is really hard, but I’ve loved every minute of it. It’s a masochistic kind of joy. There’s not much comparable to when you ***finally*** get it. I would 100% take it again.
Winter 2025 - This class is NOT easy. I would recommend this course if you are someone who loves Philosophy and CARES to do well. You will be absolutely rewarded in your efforts if you devote a significant amount of time to trying to understand it. Professor Burge warns students on the syllabus about how difficult the course is, and it spans most of the text of the syllabus. The course is about 7 weeks of establishing technical terms and 3 weeks of discussing key arguments in Kant’s “The Critique of Pure Reason.” Lectures take on the style of Professor Burge talking about things that seem highly disconnected until everything comes full circle as you study for your midterm. It is very difficult to sit and devote your full attention to taking notes for 2 hours, hanging on every last word. It is a task with huge cognitive load and the active listening/trying to figure out how to organize concepts in your notes is very difficult. You will find that you and your peers will often take different things from lectures. It is so important to make friends in this class, go to office hours, and come equipped with questions for discussion section. There is no homework! You read “The Critique of Pure Reason” on your own time as well as assigned passages, you don’t really talk about the book in lecture/discussion until the last 3 weeks where you review central arguments. It is not an easy book, but you can get by just reading what is assigned. For the midterm, Professor Burge assigns 9 questions for you to prep/memorize beforehand and then during the midterm he gives you 5 and you pick 3. It is similar for the final except you prep 12-18 questions, he gives you 4, and you pick 3 (all the midterm questions are fair game as well). The writing takes up the full 2 hour period for the midterm & final. The expectation is you spend about 45 minutes per question, and yes, there is that much content to cover in answering the questions. MY SUGGESTION: be organized in your notes from the start. All that said, yes this course is really hard, but I’ve loved every minute of it. It’s a masochistic kind of joy. There’s not much comparable to when you ***finally*** get it. I would 100% take it again.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2024 - This was the most useless, insufferable class I've taken at UCLA. Burge is not a good professor. It's not that he doesn't know what he's talking about, it's that what he's talking about makes absolutely no sense. It's the most incomprehensible, needlessly complicated, abstract bunch of nothingness. There's nothing practical or useful to take away from it. Worse, he doesn't even try to make it easy to understand. He'll emphasize that's very important to use the correct terminology, but he'll use certain words exchangably sometimes and not other times, so you don't even really know what anything means for sure---which is insane when you're getting graded on how well you can explain the material. There's not really any clear progression or goal to learning the material. There's no powerpoints or lecture notes. It's just him scribbling (illegibly, I might add) on a chalkboard while rambling and not even completing his sentences half the time. He's also pretty condescending and dismissive when questions are asked. Any time someone brings up new neuroscience research that contradicts what he's saying, he dismisses it and says [the authors] don't know what they're talking about. For someone that keeps claiming he believes in science and isn't trying to minimize it, it doesn't sound like it, which is extra frustrating to sit through as a STEM major. He also made us read a paper towards the end of the quarter and then read a response to it that he and his son wrote, but if you read the original authors' response to their response it becomes very clear that Burge and his son are wrong lol. A bunch of their rebuttals to the author's arguments are actually in support of them. I asked the TA about it during discussion and he wasn't able to explain that away very well, although he tried. It's even more frustrating that we had to prepare material for it for the final---how are we supposed to explain the argument in Burge's favor when all use of logic points to the fact that Burge's arguments are incorrect? His two midterm essays are also a pain. They're not very long, but he requires that each sentence be no more than 16 words or else you get docked points. Thankfully both the TAs during my quarter were leniant with this, and mine didn't mind that mine were 17-18 on average. He requires this in order to make us write more consisely, but honestly it's overkill and very frustrating to have to write like that. Everything about this class is needlessly complicated. I got an A on both the midterm papers - my TA was great - but seriously do not take this class if you're looking for an easy A or looking for a worthwhile class in general lol. I feel it was a genuine waste of my time and energy and was incredibly frustrated the whole time. Easily one of the worst classes I've taken here.
Winter 2024 - This was the most useless, insufferable class I've taken at UCLA. Burge is not a good professor. It's not that he doesn't know what he's talking about, it's that what he's talking about makes absolutely no sense. It's the most incomprehensible, needlessly complicated, abstract bunch of nothingness. There's nothing practical or useful to take away from it. Worse, he doesn't even try to make it easy to understand. He'll emphasize that's very important to use the correct terminology, but he'll use certain words exchangably sometimes and not other times, so you don't even really know what anything means for sure---which is insane when you're getting graded on how well you can explain the material. There's not really any clear progression or goal to learning the material. There's no powerpoints or lecture notes. It's just him scribbling (illegibly, I might add) on a chalkboard while rambling and not even completing his sentences half the time. He's also pretty condescending and dismissive when questions are asked. Any time someone brings up new neuroscience research that contradicts what he's saying, he dismisses it and says [the authors] don't know what they're talking about. For someone that keeps claiming he believes in science and isn't trying to minimize it, it doesn't sound like it, which is extra frustrating to sit through as a STEM major. He also made us read a paper towards the end of the quarter and then read a response to it that he and his son wrote, but if you read the original authors' response to their response it becomes very clear that Burge and his son are wrong lol. A bunch of their rebuttals to the author's arguments are actually in support of them. I asked the TA about it during discussion and he wasn't able to explain that away very well, although he tried. It's even more frustrating that we had to prepare material for it for the final---how are we supposed to explain the argument in Burge's favor when all use of logic points to the fact that Burge's arguments are incorrect? His two midterm essays are also a pain. They're not very long, but he requires that each sentence be no more than 16 words or else you get docked points. Thankfully both the TAs during my quarter were leniant with this, and mine didn't mind that mine were 17-18 on average. He requires this in order to make us write more consisely, but honestly it's overkill and very frustrating to have to write like that. Everything about this class is needlessly complicated. I got an A on both the midterm papers - my TA was great - but seriously do not take this class if you're looking for an easy A or looking for a worthwhile class in general lol. I feel it was a genuine waste of my time and energy and was incredibly frustrated the whole time. Easily one of the worst classes I've taken here.
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