The comments thread below on intro courses has been really interesting, one of the best threads I’ve seen on this site. To make my position a little more concrete, I thought I’d put below the fold my plan for the 101 course at Cornell next year.

The class has two 50 minute lectures, and one discussion section per week. The discussion sections are after the lectures, and they are mainly revisionary, though sometimes we go over new examples there.

_Introduction_ (one week)
One introductory lecture, one lecture on Pascal’s Wager.

_The Problem of Evil_ (three weeks)
Working through part one of Plantinga’s _God, Freedom and Evil_. Also using Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” as an example of the compatibilist challenge to Plantinga.

_Hume on Design_ (two weeks)
Discussion of the arguments about design in Hume’s _Dialogues_, with extensive background on the notion of abductive inference.

_The Meditations_ (three weeks)
As well as the obvious stuff about doubt and dualism, connect to the idea that Descartes needs a solution to the problem of epistemic evil, why not all of our beliefs are true.

_The Concept of Mind_ (two weeks)
Not the whole book obviously! Start with the response to Descartes, then the know how/know that distinction, and a couple of chapters illustrating Ryle’s attempts to give dispositional accounts of mental concepts.

_Recent Philosophy of Mind_ (three weeks)
Thought experiments promoting dualism, especially the knowledge argument. Turing vs Searle on machine thought.

That’s still fairly shallow, but there’s a little more depth there, especially at the end. I’m looking forward to trying to explain Ryle’s attempts to be an across the board dispositionalist! The idea that important parts of philosophy are all about trying to build something with extremely limited resources is I think one that students should get early on, and Ryle’s a really nice example of someone engaged in doing that.