
“We had to write our own textbook,” said HUM 0 student Levah-Mia Lone.
Photo by Farhad Taraporevala
Revelle College has announced that they will add a new General Education requirement for students, starting with those admitted as first-years or transfers in Fall Quarter 2025. “In recent years, students have been using a surprising number of ‘I know’ statements in their essays,” said Revelle College spokesperson Phil O. Sophie. “This is a problem that we hypothesize can be fixed with a new requirement: one quarter of epistemology per student — and it’s a HUM 1 prerequisite!”
Professor Greyed Ingscheme, the Head of the Humanities program, explained the HUM program’s reasoning for the change. “Students need to know what they know. If students understand that knowledge is impossible to define in the same way the scientific method is, then they’ll think twice before claiming that an inference is knowledge. Dante died 703 years ago, so we can’t go and ask him why he doesn’t see Odysseus as a hero! We need to infer based on available evidence — but some of our students don’t realize that and therefore write things like, ‘I know Dante viewed Odysseus as immoral because he lied.’ Epistemology can remedy those misconceptions about what we know we don’t know.”
Available prospective material for the course, tentatively called “HUM 0: Epistemology with Applications,” included a syllabus. Students will spend the first week of class on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and the second week on the Gettier Problem. The rest of the quarter will be spent “having their minds blown into smithereens by trying to define knowledge,” Sophie explained. “Also, it’s pronounced ‘HUM Naught.’” The class is designed to have three 80-minute lectures and five 50-minute mandatory discussion sections per week, and is taken for eight units and a letter grade. Transfer credit for HUM 0 is given to those who receive an A on the International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class, but no credit is given for the university’s internal PHIL 132 course due to the “mostly similar, but very different” subject matter.
Student reactions to the announcement varied. “I heard they’ll finally let students like me use their IB Diploma to get useful credit,” said third-year audible arts major Suffy Ring. “I can’t wait for TOK to finally help people in real life!” Firstyear computer-assisted interior design major Levah Mia Lone had a different opinion: “I don’t understand the big fuss about saying ‘I know’ in essays. Like, I know the sky is blue, and I know Odysseus is a jerk, and I know their fancy philosophy class won’t teach me anything actually useful.” Fourth-year faux-losophy major Kant Leaf-Yett appeared more ambivalent about the change: “It all depends on the syllabus, and who’s teaching it, and whether students understand the course material. I know it might help students, but it also might not!”
Sophie declined to answer questions about what would happen if the new epistemology requirement failed to help students write better essays, although Professor Ingscheme suggested that the question would be answered in the next Revelle Curriculum Review, scheduled for ten years from now. “Even if students’ essays don’t improve, we’ll judge the HUM 0 curriculum on whether it makes more thoughtful students,” Ingscheme said. “While that may be difficult to quantify, sometimes the best things in life are uncountable, intangible, and perhaps, unknowable.”