I took this class thinking it would be an easy GE, but was surprised by how demanding the class ended up being. DeWitt assigns readings and they are very hard to understand, so it takes forever to get through the readings, much longer if you take notes and actually want to understand everything the philosophers are talking about. However, she also provided notes, which were the MVP. Her lectures are worth attending because although she provides notes, she expands upon the notes in lecture. I also found my discussion section to be very engaging. Don't over think the quizlets too much. Attend your TA's office hours for essays. The class is not easy, but it was pretty eye opening and I felt like I grew as a person through this class. Also, you really don't need to use the internet at all for her essays and you shouldn't.

Professor DeWitt is clearly very knowledgable about the subject and provides ample resources for us to develop a solid understanding of the content. I found that her lectures often get sidetracked with her drilling the same points over and over again using more anecdotes/examples than probably necessary, as well as spending a lot of time answering tangential student questions about the material. This isn't necessarily bad, as it helps deepen my understanding of the content to a degree, but it can be a little frustrating waiting for her to get back on track and makes it more difficult to stay focused. Luckily this doesn't turn out to be a huge problem as she provides her lecture notes on the class website, which are well-formatted and great study resources on their own. Also, the professor tends to introduce her own biases into the lessons on philosophy--not political/personal ones; moreso her philosophical preferences for or against certain schools of thought find their way into the lectures. I believe that being a little bit more impartial would better serve her goal of teaching us how to think for ourselves and critically analyze philosophy from our own points of view.
Despite the minor qualms above, I still came out of the class satisfied in what I learned about philosophy. I had never taken a philosophy class before and this class was a great introduction to the field. Besides a few papers and examlets, there is not much work to be done in the class besides studying. I'd recommend this class for those comfortable in their writing looking for a solid GE or introduction to philosophy.

The lectures would be interesting sometimes but for the most part I found myself unable to pay attention the whole time. She's not the most engaging lecturer, and she also answers too many questions during lecture which means there isn't enough time to cover the material. There were 3 essays in total ranging from 2-4 pages and I got virtually no feedback on them from my TA. A lot of the theories that she teaches get incredibly repetitive. The readings honestly weren't necessary, just really study her lecture notes for the 3 examlets (which were open note). Essentially, the whole quarter you will be learning about possible theories of why we act the way that we do through the lens of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill. That sounded like it would be interesting to me at first but the course wasn't really what I expected it to be like.

I have many concerns regarding Janelle DeWitt and how she conducted herself in class. She has narrow ideas about what is valid and good scholarship. Unfortunately, this view seemed to be affected by the race and gender of the students. More than once she chose to ignore the pronouns requested by the transgender student in class. The most alarming was her racially insensitive and bias statements on non-western thought. Besides this, she is inconsistent with her grading and provides zero explanation for it. In this class you either conform and agree with her or be outcasted. I received the grade I wanted but it wasn't easy swallowing and witnessing the racial aggressions so I will not be taking another philosophy class with J. Dewitt. I suggest fellow POC to stay clear of her as well.

I don’t know if I would consider this class an “easy GE,” but it is definitely manageable! Your main homework consists of reading moral theories (which can be long & confusing at times) and different philosophers’ takes on moral issues. We wrote a total of three essays, and they’re pretty well spaced out so it doesn’t feel like a crushing amount of work. If the tests weren’t open note there would be a fair bit of studying, so that may change as the class moves back to being in person. Overall was an interesting class that I would definitely take again!

Overall, the class was fairly interesting and a good intro-level philosophy class. I don't really have any complaints, except that a lot of the readings were concentrated at the end of the quarter. That being said, I was able to do fine on the final exam and paper without thoroughly reading through everything. Just make sure to be familiar with the content on the prof's screen shares, which contain both the main points of the assigned readings and her takes on those points.

Although this class is somewhat interesting, it was much harder than it needed to be because of the professor and TA. The lectures were so confusing and the Professor read verbatim off of the notes so attending lecture gave no further insight or help. The TA I had was also super unhelpful and the grading between TA's was very inconsistent. Overall I would choose a different philosophy class if you can and would not recommend this class.

Overall, Professor DeWitt is a nice person but her lectures were kinda unclear and this was a pretty light-workload class. If you're gonna do the readings, I'd take this class.

During lecture, she went over screenshares of a word doc with notes on it about the topic (Bentham, Kant, abortion, death penalty, gun control, etc.) Some parts were helpful, but when she tried to explain things in further detail, she'd repeat things but not concisely so they didn't make sense; it was like she was trying to explain it well by talking more but it didn't help that much.

The weighting sucked, I wish we had more padding assignments and that the final paper wasn't weighted 35% of the grade because philosophy is a hard class. TBH I didn't do any of the readings beforehand like we were supposed to so that may factor into why I was confused during lecture all the time. The mcq tests were also super easy because they were open note.

What I like about Professor DeWitt is that she was very clear that we could just email our TA for extensions on the papers, stating that in emails and in the prompt documents, and you don't really need a good excuse either, so I used all the 1-2 day extension opportunities. I got B- average on my papers, but to be honest I did them all last minute and I didn't really understand the concepts as well as I could've.

There was no collaboration in lectures, and only once or twice did we have to collaborate with others during discussion section.

Concepts were pretty vague and subjective, so it was hard to wrap my mind around things. I took this class as a pre-major req and because I wanted to find a good framework of morality for me to use in life, but I don't think it was that helpful in the latter aspect. I still managed to get a B+ even though I didn't prioritize this class, so I guess take this class if you are interested in learning about old philosophy ideas and their application on modern topics.

Prof. DeWitt is very nice and I can feel her passion for Kantian Ethics from every lecture of her. She has tried her best to make things clear though there is still a bit of room for improvement (sometimes she makes things too clear, which can make it hard to track where the entire discussion is going -- but this wasn't too much a problem). Would recommend and take again.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT PHILOSOPHY. lectures were very hard to pay attention to since she just read off the slides. and there were students who asked very theoretical questions during lecture. my ta was joshua and graded very hard and was mean during office hours/discussion so I got low scores on all the writing pieces. the prof was very nice tho during office hours.