Learning Outcome Three: Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
When I take annotations I believe it it to not only help understand and connect but to take and use when writing something of my own. Annotations are a great way to deep dive into a text and really pull out fundamental components to help whether its for research or just better understanding. Annotations also help me challenge the ideas from the author and question them as well. I use them in my writing by taking what’s interesting but said a little plain and turning it into a piece of writing people will actually sit down and read.
I read an essay called “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice” by Anthony Kwame Appiah and I had to prepare it for discussion. I went through the essay highlighting areas where I had questions, terms that needed extended definitions, and what connections I made with the article. Once I found quotes for each section, I provided an explanation on what my take was on the quote. This process helped me get use to analyzing important texts and other scientific articles. Below, the questions are in orange , the challenges are in blue, and the connections are in green. These match up with the annotated images added below.
Questions for the text:
On page 68 paragraph 3 Appiah states, ” I have settled on cosmopolitanism.” What is cosmopolitanism?
When Appiah states “Cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the challenge” on a subtext on page 69 it caught my eye. What does he mean its not the solution?
“Loyalties and local allegiances determine more than what we want; they determine who we are.” This was said by Appiah on the second paragraph of page 71. Does this mean that our dependance on others is really for our own benefit?
On page 74 paragraph 3 Appiah states, ” But others would ground their judgment not in any particular law but in a conception…” I end the quote there but i just want to know what does he mean by “conception”?
When Appiah states in page 77 in the subtext, ” Reasoning… comes in not when we are going on in the usual way, but when we are thinking about change.” What is this supposed to mean? Does continuing in our daily habits not bring reasoning to us or those around?
Understanding text:
This quote helped me understand when it said earlier we were all brought into a “single web of trade”. ” And the possibilities of good and of ill are multiplied beyond all measure when it comes to policies carried out by governments in our name”(Appiah 68).
“Remember you are citizens of the world”(Appiah 71) This helped me understand cosmopolitanism because we are not owned by people just like us. We should not do the bidding of people who share the same culture or traditions. Instead we should be one with each other and follow the rules of nature.
I had trouble believing the realism behind cosmopolitanism thinking. But this quote helped clear things up. “Cosmopolitanism is an adventure and an ideal: But you can’t have any respect for human diversity and expect everyone to become cosmopolitan”(Appiah 72). This says that being a cosmopolitan is is not easy and takes time and effort at least in my eyes.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”(Appiah 74). Cosmopolitanism is all about freedom and equality. I am religious so this mad sense to me and helped develop the concept.
Appiah does a good job of connecting what he says to people and how they think. He states, ” I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another”(Appiah 78) .
Challenge text:
Before this quote Appiah was talking about Hitler and Stalin. “they were right to see cosmopolitanism as their enemy”(Appiah 70). He says this because the way they believed things it was a loyalty created for a single class. But could they have been trying to create equality of just what they seen as superior.
“: to do for others what morality requires”(Appiah 72). Why listen to something that can be seen from many different perspectives.
Appiah states, “Americans tend to have, in sum, a broadly liberal reaction when they do hear about their fellow citizens’ doing something that they would not do themselves”(Appiah 74). This in a way is very true but easily disagreeable. Maybe in some social groups but not in a good amount of some societies in America.
Extending off a previous quote Appiah states, “They mostly think it is not their business and not the governments business’ either”(Appiah 74). Everything nowadays is the governments business and most people get that and even try and use that for personal gain.
“And a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right because it is what we are used to”(Appiah 75). This goes off a prototype we use in a situation based off pass experience. But it reality its all situational.
