Loren Lomasky is an awesome guy. For Spring 2012 we read Adam Smith,Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ayn Rand, C.A. Cohen and Milton Freidman. I thought the readings (excluding Rousseau) were interesting and fun. There was a fair amount of reading that we had to do per class, but it was manageable. Lecture was pretty fun because Lomasky does a good job of involving the students. Like others have said, Lomasky can sometimes struggle with time management but it wasn't really a detriment to the class. The TA I had, Bryan Cwik, was a pretty tough grader and could be pretty grumpy sometimes, but he did a good job of leading discussions. I learned a lot from him. You have to write two 4-7 page papers on a topic relating to the readings, but they aren't super difficult and you get several chances to do them - about 5 or 6 potential paper topics. I would definitely suggest that people looking to satisfy PHIL or PLPT requirements take this class. Heck, even if you don't need to - take it! One of my favorite classes at UVA.

Lomasky is hilarious and it's good to get to know these philosophers (Spring 2009 we covered Smith, Rousseau, Rand, Rawls, and Nozick). Grading is based on two papers, a midterm, and final. Stewart Braun was a good TA - he graded fairly and effectively facilitated discussions.

The material's awesome. Lomasky is hilarious, but he has a terrible time with time management. Because he goes off on tangents, for most books he didn't end up covering a lot of the reading. If you're the type of person who doesn't do well when you have to learn a lot of material on your own, you might not want to take it. I really liked it though.