THIS CLASS IS EASY IF YOU KNOW HOW TO MAKE YOUR WAY AROUND IT.

At the beginning, you're faced with multiple (difficult) readings every week and super long (semi-boring) lectures. HOWEVER, you can get through the class quite easily without having to read or even attend lectures. The KEY to this class is the discussion (saraliza is amazing) and the slides. Dissecting the slides themselves & sometimes going over it with the lecture (on 2x speed) are more than enough for you to be able to write your weekly journal (literally one paragraph on what you thought about the material) and to do the Midterm Essay and Final Essay. ALTHOUGH, key mistakes that people make in this class is that they do not know how to write a philosophical paper. It is MUCH different than how one would write a typical paper so you should definitely do some research/speak with your TA. I was able to write both my midterm and final essay in about 2-3 days and got A- on both of them just by grabbing content from the slides and my own outside research. Section participation is points so make sure you can attend (this is the one portion that I really recommend paying attention to). OH and there are REALLY EASY one-question quizzes during section every week, but they are literally so easy it's laughable (plus they drop your lowest 3... and if you have saraliza she'll give you extra quizzes to help you out at the end) The only thing that annoyed me was at the end of week 10, they told us that our section participation and journal entires would be marked a 90% even if you did 100% of the work to make some sort of curve?? It definitely put pressure on making sure I got an A- again on the final, but overall was not too bad. The content is also really interesting but sometimes could get boring if you're into politics. OVERALL, easy class once you get the hang of it.

Not a big fan of philosophy, but nevertheless Gallagher did a good job of explaining content. Her slides are kind of a headache to look at, with lots of all caps and bolded font, but they're super helpful when you're writing the papers. No tests, just 2 papers (I think it was 3 before covid) and participation/quizzes/weekly journals. You can honestly write whatever in the journals, I don't think the TAs really read them. In any given grade, the highest you can get is a 95% which is super frustrating, but that is mitigated with the generous grading.

You do not have to do any of the readings. Seriously. They're long and confusing, but Dr. Gallagher lectures on all of the content anyway. I read 3 pages of the first reading then stopped and still pulled out an A.

This class is a nice GE if you're looking for a light workload (asynchronous and most of work was just the essays). You basically don't have to do the readings, since Gallagher breaks them down very thoroughly during lecture. Just make sure to take good notes, so you have content to use during your papers. This quarter, we only had one midterm paper and one final paper; these two papers essentially determined your grade, so you had to do really well on them. I highly recommend attending office hours to go over your ideas/thesis with your TA or the professor; they're generally very open to helping. It's also helpful to peer review! Find some people in the class open to peer review, and it will definitely improve your grades on your papers. It was a bit of a boring class, but it was a decent GE.

tl;dr: decent GE, prob not the best but far from the worst

this class was decent, esp if you're interested in the topic. if you're not, it can get boring. lectures are like 75 min but she often goes over time (iirc our longest lecture was 150 minutes long). personally i zoned out a lot during lectures.

this class is asyncronous but discussions have mandatory participation. (basically just answering questions, although at the end she mentioned that they only counted attendence for participation)

class is structured like this: 1 midterm essay(4-5pgs), 1 final essay(5-6 pgs). gallagher mentioned that in previous non-covid years there was 2 midterm essays tho.

your essays are graded by TA, if you have a good TA you will get an A if you put in the work, if you have a sucky TA, lol GG.

grading is like 25ish% attendance/participation in discussion, 20% midterm, 30% final, 25% short discussion section quizzes.

The quizzes are every week, one multiple choice question on zoom. super easy, its basically just making sure you watched the lecture/didn't fall asleep during lecture. she also dropped 3 of the quizzes (out of 9 total) so its super easy to get this part. No other quizzes/tests exist.

essays are decent, you could probably do each essay in 6-10 hrs if you dont care too much and just grind out an essay.
pro tip: there are readings which are long, but theyre optional which means dont do them lol. do the readings when you write an essay tho so you can reference material. also her lectures are pretty in depth so you probnably dont even need to do the readings at all.
If youre reading this and this helped you out, pls review ur profs!! itll help us all out uwu

Dr. Gallagher is incredibly helpful and engaging. Her lectures are comprehensive & detailed, so you don't need to spend hours on the readings each week. There is a simple one-question quiz in each discussion that you'll get right if you've paid any attention in the lecture, and an open-ended journal to write a paragraph each week. The main assignments are the midterm & final paper, but you have lots of time & help to complete those. Overall Dr. Gallagher is a great professor and I definitely recommend taking this low-stress class!

Often goes overtime, cherrypicking readings will get you by in this class.

This class was super interesting and I am very glad I took it. Gallagher was pretty boring but I'd really recommend turning off phones/laptops and pretty much writing down everything she says. She stresses what she wants you to know, and you can't just rely on the slides for your essays if you want a good grade. Everyone read the readings at the beginning, but then by week 4 or 5 nobody was reading them, just waiting for her to go through them in lecture. I think you should still skim through them before/after lecture as it's good to know where the writers talk about what she's discussing, and useful for discussion sections. Go to the writing center, it was really helpful as I had not written a philosophical essay before.
Overall, the workload is pretty light and there are no tests, only essays. I'd recommend this class.

I took this class as a GE, so it definitely filled its purpose. There really isn't much work, except for the 3 essays and the readings. The essays got progressively longer, and the last one was about creating our own philosophy, rather than analyzing previous work. Tips on how to write the essay were usually given by your TA during discussion, who also graded the papers. I often wrote the essays the day they were due and did fine. I did the readings a few times, but the professor went over it in detail during lecture, and they took a lot of time up. Besides being used in our essays, they aren't super necessary; when looking for quotes to use in the essays, I either used the quotes that Professor Gallagher used on her slides or skimmed until something applied to my thesis. Other than the essays, the only other thing that was graded was 4 pop quizzes containing a single question, given in discussion. They were out of one point, and only the top 3 scores were included in the final grade. These questions correlated with the lectures and were often on the end of the slides. Lecture itself is unnecessary to go to, since she posts the detailed slides online. The slides were very dense, to the point that she basically read from them. I, personally, was not interested by the subject matter to begin with, and to add to that she is a very soft spoken/unexciting lecturer, so I stopped going around week 5. Overall, I can't complain, as my grade reflects the effort I put in. My TA was Sarah Beach, who was great. Discussions were often boring too, since people rarely participated, and it was spent debating/analyzing philosophy from lecture. She was very willing to help with the essays, and I received very helpful notes back from her. I probably wouldn't take this class again because of how boring it was, but it is an easy GE that doesn't require a lot of work.

I was not interested in this subject, therefore I did not enjoy this class. The lectures were very long and boring. The homework load was not too bad at all. If you skim the readings before class you will be prepared. Three essays are required and you must understand the complex concepts of the readings to write a good essay. Work with your TA if you don't understand.

Phil 6 is a good GE to take, but only if you're willing to put in the work. The readings are long and they are dense, they took me a while to get through and it can pile up if you don't do them. However with that being said it's not that difficult to just listen to lecture which summarizes the ideas of the readings (very succinctly and well). Lecture was kind of boring because of the content, but she does her best. In section we had four "pop" quizzes throughout, but they're p/np and super straightforward if you do the readings. The papers are hard not gonna lie, and you have to put the work in to get a good grade on them but it is possible. Reading/writing heavy class, dense.