my basic sketch of it is that philosophy and rationality are overconcerned with objective reality, and that we should instead focus on how perceptions are subjective and how we relate to one another.
I'd go even further than that, and state that the very notion of an objective reality onto which we can project our "rational" action without regard for social or moral/ethical factors is somewhat peculiar. It seems to be very much a product of the overall notion of λόγος - variously given the meaning of "argument", "opinion", "reason", "number", "rationality" and even "God" (as in the general idea of a "God's Eye View") - that seems to permeate Western culture.
Needless to say, such "logocentrism" is nowadays viewed quite critically and even ridiculed by postmodernists and feminists, as well as by others who point out that non-Western philosophies often held quite different point of view, even within supposedly "rational" schools of thought. For instance, the Chinese Confucianists and Mohists advocated a "Rectification [i.e. proper use] of Names" as the proper foundation of all rational inquiry, which many in the Western tradition would find quite hard to understand (with some well-deserved exceptions, of course).
The idea that clarity about language is important is very familiar indeed in the Western philosophical tradition. ("It all depends what you mean by ..." is pretty much a paradigmatic, or even caricatural, philosopher's utterance.) It sounds as if the Confucian notion has a rather different spin on it -- focusing on terminology related to social relationships, with the idea that fixing the terminology will lead to fixing the relationships -- and a bunch of related assumptions not highly favoured among Western analytic philosophers -- but I can't h...
This would count toward my major, and if I weren't going to take it, the likely replacement would be a course in experimental/"folk" philosophy. But I'd also like to hear your thoughts on the virtues of academic rationality courses in general.
(The main counterargument, I'd imagine, is that the Sequences cover most of the same material in a more fluid and comprehensible fashion.)
Here is the syllabus: http://www.yale.edu/darwall/PHIL+333+Syllabus.pdf
Other information: I sampled one lecture for the course last year. It was a noncommital discussion of Newcomb's problem, which I found somewhat interesting despite having read most of the LW material on the subject.
When I asked what Omega would do if we activated a random number generator with a 50.01% chance of one-boxing us, the professors didn't dismiss the question as irrelevant, but they also didn't offer any particular answer.
I help run a rationality meetup at Yale, and this seems like a good place to meet interested students. On the other hand, I could just as easily leave flyers around before the class begins.
Related question: Could someone quickly sum up what might be meant by the "feminist critique" of rationality, as would be discussed in the course? I've read a few abstracts, but I'm still not sure I know the most important points of these critiques.