Week 14 Discussion — What Makes You You, and Who Made You? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Hook

A cart in a museum is its wheels, axle, frame, and pole put together, and a new nurse becomes a nurse in the full sense through senior staff and patients. One picture says there is no permanent self beyond the parts; the other says a person is a person through other persons. Both push against the idea that you are a finished, standalone thing.

Your discussion question — choose Option A or Option B; they carry the same weight and the same rubric, and you say which you picked.

Option A: Is a person anything over and above their parts? Take a position using the chariot from the Questions of King Milinda and the Buddhist teaching of no-self, Locke's memory theory from Week 7, or ubuntu's relational personhood, test it on a change in your own life or one you have watched, and say which of the other views is hardest for your position to meet.

Option B: Think about a decision made with your family or a community you belong to, such as the family at the kitchen table deciding how to care for a grandmother. Choose one idea from this week (Confucian xiao and li, Daoist wu wei, or ubuntu), reason through the decision with it, and say where it parts from one European theory the course has met, without ranking either.

There is no single right answer. Careful thinkers in every one of these traditions still disagree about what a self is and about how much of who we are comes from other people. Pick the option you actually care about, and tell us your reasoning.

Expectations

Activity format: one initial post followed by two substantive peer replies. Plan on about 45 minutes across the two deadlines; your instructor sets both due dates in Canvas.

Your initial post — by the first due date (early in the module week):

• Say which option you chose.
• For Option A, say whether a person is anything over and above their parts, using no-self and the chariot, Locke's memory theory, or relational personhood, and test your view on a real change; for Option B, reason through a family or community decision with xiao and li, wu wei, or ubuntu, and say in one plain sentence where that idea parts from one European theory.
• Use at least two of this week's terms (no-self, the chariot, relational personhood, gloss, ren, li, xiao, wu wei) correctly.
• State the view you find hardest to meet in its strongest form, give your reason, and say what would change your mind.
• Length: roughly 150–250 words if written. You may instead record your post as audio or video (about two minutes) and attach a transcript; both forms are scored by the same rubric.
• Present every tradition in its own terms, never as exotic or lesser, and rank none of them. Keep any example away from hot-button topics and real current controversies, and never name a real person in a case.

Your replies — by the second due date (the end of the module week):

• Reply substantively to at least two classmates.
• A substantive reply does more than agree: state the strongest version of the poster's view in your own words, ask whether their example really fits the idea they tie it to, or offer a variation, labelled as one, that pulls the other way. "Nice point!" on its own does not count.

What a strong post looks like:

I chose Option A. I think a person is nothing over and above a changing collection of parts, and I read that through the chariot. When I moved across the country, almost everything about me changed: my habits, my friends, even what I remembered most often. Looking back, I cannot find one fixed thing that stayed the same underneath. The strongest objection is the unity objection: my experiences all come together in one point of view, and a chariot has no point of view at all. I grant that the comparison is imperfect. But consciousness is one of the 5 parts of the collection, so the sense of a single point of view can belong to the collection itself. And no-self does not say I am not real; it says there is no permanent self behind the changing me. What would change my mind is a case where something about me stayed fixed through every change.

Notice how it takes a position, states the other side at its strongest, ties the reason to no-self as the course defines it, keeps no permanent self apart from no person at all, and says what would change the writer's mind. That is the bar.

Participation rubric

This discussion is worth 10 points. The three criteria below look at your initial post and your peer replies.

Post early if you can — the best threads happen when people have time to reply before the second due date.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com