The students in Philosophy 1050-G11 have spent the spring semester of 2009 reading works by Plato, Augustine, Locke, and Marx (amongst many others). Their formal academic papers on these philosophers presented thoughtful analyses and insightful applications which would be both informative and meaningful to other students who had studied these texts carefully.

In this website, however, these students have taken on another challenge. Working in teams of two or three, they have taken-up some of the pivotal ideas of these philosophers; not only have they endeavored to explain these ideas clearly and concisely, but also offer some interesting and important implications of these works that would be relevant to those who have neither read these texts nor taken a philosophy course. Reading these brief pages, in other words, should give you a quick glimpse into some of the major ideas of the philosophers; furthermore, you may see how these ideas are applicable to the contemporary world, and perhaps especially to the lives of contemporary college students in the United States.

Although the teams had responsibility for their individual pages, the students have also collaborated to create a uniform look and feel to the entire website; so, in a sense, all the members of the class are responsible for the entire website. We encourage you to study these pages and to reflect on what they offer; we think you will find them interesting and provocative.

Adrienne B. St.Clair

Villanova University

May 2009