Teaching scepticism cross-culturally (Roger Clarke)

This is a guest post by Roger Clarke, Queens University Belfast

I've found myself teaching a class ("module", in the local dialect) on scepticism in Sextus Empiricus, Nāgārjuna, and Zhuāngzǐ. I do so, despite a complete lack of training in any of the philosophical traditions those three philosophers belong to. I think this might be interesting to others as an example of (a) teaching what you don't already know and also (b) including non-Western philosophical traditions without, I hope, either tokenising or taking jobs away from specialists.

Let me acknowledge something important at the start here. I'm a cisgender able-bodied white man. I even wear a beard. I look a whole lot like the stereotypical philosopher. Regardless of how much respect I deserve from my students, I have had to do less to earn it than other folks might. So, some of the strategies that have worked for me might not work as well for other teachers. I am, after all, describing here a style of teaching that involves the brazen absence of a certain kind of expertise usually present and generally expected in a teacher; for this to work, students must be willing to believe the teacher deserves their job and has a sound plan for the class.

In the following, I've tried to deal with this concern – to make what I describe more portable – by being explicit about what sort of expertise I am bringing to the class, and about how I made the choices I made. My instinct is for self-deprecation, but that's an expression of privilege: I can say "I'm an idiot", because I'm confident none of my students will believe it. Likewise, when I can get by without explaining the reasoning behind my choices (about what content to include and also about how to run the class) it's because I can count on my students to presume I am in fact paying attention and that I'm qualified to be in charge of the class. I know we can't all count on that sort of goodwill.

This is not unrelated to another question: even if the students don't think I'm an impostor, I sure might. My strategy for dealing with impostor syndrome in this class has been to own up to my shortcomings: I'm not teaching the class because I'm already an expert in the subject matter, I'm teaching it because I know how to write philosophy essays, because I know how to find other people's philosophical work, and because I know enough about other areas of philosophy to help students out. I do tell them in the first class that I am not an expert in any of our three main philosophers, but I am a trained epistemologist who knows something about contemporary debates on similar questions. That's enough for me to feel like I'm not wasting the students' time.

Why This?

The class is a final (third) year undergraduate module at Queen's University Belfast. Third year modules are supposed to exemplify "research-led teaching", so I'm given relatively free rein to shape my teaching here to my current research interests. I'm mainly an epistemologist, mainly interested in belief and context-relativity. People who write about epistemic contextualism traditionally have things to say about responding to scepticism, but since my work has little to say about what we can know, I found I had little to say about the versions of scepticism I'd been taught about as an undergraduate. On the other hand, I heard a rumour that ancient Greek scepticism tended not to be framed in terms of what we can know, but rather in terms of avoiding belief. So, I made my first change to the module I'd been teaching: instead of a full module on epistemic contextualism, for two years I made the first half of the module about contextualism and the second about Sextus Empiricus's Pyrrhonian scepticism. After all, they say the best way to learn a new subject is to teach it. (Or, as Ian James Kidd put it to me, to write a book about it—but as far as I can tell based on my own efforts, writing a book is literally impossible, so I can't recommend that alternative, despite the excellent advice available here.)

The second change I made was to replace the half-module on contextualism with another half module on unfamiliar topics. This change was driven less purely by my research interests, although I do hope someday to contribute to debates on Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ. Rather, I'm persuaded it would be a good thing to have syllabi not only less dominated by white men, but also less dominated by the Western philosophical traditions. So, I've been looking for ways to include more non-Western approaches in my class, and here was a natural place to do so: for both Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ, there is a debate in the secondary literature (in English—debates in non-Anglophone secondary literature are inaccessible to me and my students) about whether they express or advocate a scepticism parallel to Sextus's. My interest in Sextus is already shaped by a comparative question ("How is Pyrrhonian scepticism different from Cartesian or modern scepticism?"), it makes perfect sense to extend the comparative question to ask about varieties of scepticism in multiple traditions. That's why, two years ago, I replaced the half-module on contextualism with a half-module on scepticism in Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ.

I picked the specific readings I assigned in a couple of ways. Before teaching each unit for the first time, I did a certain amount of reading on my own before teaching began, but I collected a lot more secondary readings and produced lightly annotated bibliographies (see below). I then had students shape some of the syllabus by picking their own readings to present on. (Here's the pitch: "I've picked readings I'm interested in. You should pick readings you're interested in. We'll read them all.") In subsequent years, having taught a unit once, I've had a clearer sense of core questions and readings I want to make sure are discussed in class, but I've still offered students the chance to lead discussion on other readings.

What We Did

The structure of the class is roughly as follows. We have twelve week teaching terms at my institution, with a norm that no content is delivered in the first and last weeks, so there are normally only ten weeks of substance. We spend about four weeks on Sextus, followed by three weeks each on Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ. Students are assessed on a final essay (55%), a Levels System exercise (35%), and two presentations (10% total), each of which I'll describe further below.

We have three contact hours per week: a one-hour "lecture" class on Mondays and a two-hour "tutorial" on Fridays. I tell students that the labels might be misleading: the main event is the Friday class, which we run as a seminar/discussion group on the week's readings. (There are usually between twelve and seventeen students in this class; we had fifteen in 2018-19.) I don't plan most of the Monday classes at the start of the semester, planning instead to use them for working on whatever students need or want at the time. I do reserve the first Monday "lecture" on each philosopher for something like an actual lecture, aiming to give some background and context for the readings to come.

Other than the occasional exchange student, students will be either Philosophy majors ("Single Honours Philosophy" students, we call them) or joint Philosophy and X majors, where X is usually either History, English, or Politics. All of the Philosophy majors and some of the others will be writing an undergraduate dissertation over the course of this academic year; since my module runs in the first semester, I think it's a particularly good place to emphasise independent research skills. I try to be explicit about the skills and techniques I think they might find useful in developing their dissertation projects.

Syllabus

The full list of readings is in the module guide (pp 5-6), but broadly speaking, we do four weeks on Sextus and three each on Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ (in that order). Students have three books to buy: Annas & Barnes' translation of Sextus's Outlines, Siderits and Katsura's translation of Nāgārjuna's Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, and Ziporyn's translation of the Zhuāngzǐ. Otherwise, the required readings and lots of additional readings are provided via the module website.

We begin with Sextus in part because I'm mainly interested in comparative questions about Pyrrhonian scepticism rather than with what we might call Cartesian scepticism. (Roughly: Pyrrhonian sceptics are people who suspend judgment and avoid belief; Cartesian sceptics are people who claim or argue that we do not or cannot know very much.) But I also see Sextus as a relatively gentle introduction to reading unfamiliar kinds of philosophy. Neither I nor the students read Greek, and I make it clear that I'm not an expert in ancient philosophy. Therefore, we need to rely on proper scholars (that is, the secondary readings) to keep us straight. We get used to the idea that familiar words—even familiar technical terms—might not mean what we think. So finding out that we need to check with our secondary sources to confirm that things like "sceptic", "dogma(tic)", "belief" mean what we think they do; similarly, I hope they'll be careful with words we'll encounter later like "nibbana" and "kamma".

The unit on Sextus focusses on questions I think are worth asking about Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ when we get to them:

• Sextus seems to allow that sceptics will do something like believing after all: they don't assent to any impression or appearance, but they do acquiesce or go along with impressions forced on them. What could this non-belief belief-like attitude possibly be?
• Can the sceptic lead a normal life? A lack of beliefs would probably make at least some difference to how one behaves, and scepticism is supposed to make a difference to whether one lives well. On the other hand, Sextus does seem to want to uphold ordinary life.
• Sextus says suspending judgment leads to tranquillity. Why should this be so?
• There seems to be something self-undermining in any actual assertion or recommendation of scepticism. "You shouldn't believe anything, including this."

These questions have clear parallels in studying Nagarjuna, so that unit follows next. Nāgārjuna also suggests (or seems to?) that we should not treat any thesis as (ultimately) true and denies that he himself has any thesis. Parallel to Sextus's acquiescence to or going along with appearances, though, Nāgārjuna allows that there are conventional truths. And recognising universal emptiness (including any statement's emptiness of ultimate truth) is a step toward liberation—although it's harder to see Nāgārjuna than Sextus as wanting his philosophy to be compatible with leading a perfectly ordinary life.

Finally we have three weeks on Zhuāngzǐ. It's harder to pin down what's going on in the Zhuāngzǐ—which is part of its enduring appeal—but its second chapter sure seems to give an attack on any rational attempt to say how things are. And this in turn can be read as an avoidance of settled belief. This is a pretty sharp turn from the previous unit: Nāgārjuna's work is full of very formal and explicit argumentation; Zhuāngzǐ’s is full of loosely connected jokes and stories. Much of the secondary literature I assign suggests Zhuāngzǐ's indirectness might be a way of avoiding self-refutation. At any rate, the text is extremely rich, and invites all sorts of comparative questions.

Presentations

Each student signs up to present on one reading in the unit on Sextus and one reading in the units on Nāgārjuna and Zhuāngzǐ. The presenter's job is to lead discussion on the assigned reading—not, I take pains to emphasise, to recite a summary of the reading. In my experience, it takes a concerted effort to convince students (at least at this university) that a presentation exercise could or should be anything other than a recapitulation of the material being presented. I had reasonable success this time around, by taking the following steps:

1. The instructions, written in the 10-page module guide and explained aloud in the first several classes, are explicit about what's being marked and what isn't. I require students to provide a handout, and the presentation mark is based on this handout and "the quality of discussion in class". (Bureaucratic reason for requiring a handout: anything assessed is supposed to have a paper trail we can send to the external examiner. Pedagogical reason: students who can't attend class or who have anxiety issues can still get a presentation mark.) And the handout isn't being marked for accuracy of exposition: rather, students are supposed to come up with questions for discussion, and these are the main thing I look at in marking the handout.
2. I do the first presentation myself, including a handout, which is very brief on exposition of the associated readings. As I present it, I try to include some meta-narrative, describing what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, what in my presentation I think is worth imitating, how I came up with questions, etc.
3. I give out pre-emptive feedback. After the previous year's first round of presentations, I gave the whole class generic advice about good practice in giving presentations/leading discussion. I distributed that document to this class at the beginning of the semester.
4. I asked students to think about tutorials they'd had with good discussion. What did the tutorial leader do in those classes? Students responded well to this, I think: they thought tutorials had tended to go well when the tutor prepared some kind of structured exercise, and so they did the same with their presentations. I offered to suggest group discussion gimmicks, but students mostly came up with ideas on their own.
5. Luckily, the first few presenters asked questions (in class) about what they were allowed to do, rather than plunging ahead. So, I was able to say in earshot of the whole class something along the lines of: "You can do whatever you want. You're in charge of the class now."

I have only limited student feedback (4 students filled out evaluations), but all the evidence I have suggests students liked the presentations.

The Levels Exercise

I took the general framework of a Levels exercise from Dustin Locke: students submit a writing exercise every week until Week 8; submissions receive a mark of either "Complete", "Almost", "Good Effort", or "Needs Work"; once a student scores "Complete" on a writing exercise, they "level up", "unlocking" a more challenging exercise for the next week's submission; their mark for the Levels component is determined by the highest score achieved on the highest-level exercise unlocked.

For this class, I wanted to use the Levels system to focus specifically on drawing students' attention to the structure of arguments in the secondary literature. It can be difficult for students to distinguish between, for example, (a) arguments that one ought always to suspend judgment and (b) arguments that Sextus thinks one ought always to suspend judgment. Moreover, it can be difficult for nonspecialists reading secondary sources to notice which claims are controversial; paying extra attention to which claims about the primary source are argued for and which are just asserted without support helps the uninitiated to smell controversy.

Here, then, are the three levels I used:

• Level 1: Argument Identification. Find an argument in a secondary source about how to interpret a primary source. Put the argument into numbered premise-conclusion form.
• Level 2. Expository Essay (~400-500 words). Find an argument in a secondary source about how to interpret a primary source. Explain the argument in your own words.
• Level 3. Critical Essay (~800-1000 words). Find an argument in a secondary source about how to interpret a primary source. Explain the argument in your own words. Give an objection to the argument in your own words. Be explicit about what in the original argument you're objecting to. Does it have a false premise? If so, which one? Does the conclusion not follow from the premises? If so, what missing premise would need to be added?

Students receiving a mark other than Complete would need to choose a different passage to base subsequent attempts at the same level on; students receiving a mark of Complete and thus levelling up were permitted to reuse the same passage for the next level's exercise.

Again, I've had pretty limited feedback, but I can say a few things with confidence:

1. Students did not understand what the exercise was supposed to be, at least at first. Part of the problem might be that I made the instructions too verbose. (And if I'm aiming to teach careful reading skills, I probably shouldn't count too much on students already having careful reading skills.) I don't think I'll shorten the written instructions next time around, though. Instead, I'll spend more time in the first classes talking about the exercise and practising it.
2. We spent many, many Monday classes practising Levels exercises. I don't think this was a bad thing. Sometimes we worked on identifying arguments in the readings. Sometimes we talked about the difference (harder to grasp than I'd anticipated) between arguments about the primary text and arguments about the first-order philosophical questions. Sometimes we practised putting arguments in numbered-premise form. (Students had all practised this in first-year introductory classes, but not since.) Once we practised turning a numbered-premise argument into prose, one sentence at a time. I think all of these skills are important, but since in each case we were working with a chunk of text I thought worth assigning in the first place, we were also working through philosophical content.
3. I don't think students liked the Levels assignment. I do think I will use it again. This was my first time, and I might be able to make it more popular next time. But regardless of how students felt about it, I think it achieved its purpose. The final essays were generally much better than usual at engaging with secondary debates about how to interpret Sextus, Nāgārjuna, and Zhuāngzǐ.

The Essay

I gave students freedom to write their final essay on whatever topic they liked, as long as it was related to the class material, and as long as they run their plan by me first. I've had negative student feedback in the past for not assigning paper topics/titles, but I really want students to be coming up with their own projects. I did suggest some very broad essay questions (“Is Zhuāngzǐ/Nāgārjuna a sceptic in Sextus's sense?”, “Is Cartesian scepticism more radical than Pyrrhonian scepticism?”), but more importantly, I think, I was proactive in talking to students individually about essay plans. Most of this happened in Monday classes: hearing other students' essay plans, and hearing the lecturer give feedback, can help one come up with/feel OK about one's own essay plan. But I also talked with students one-on-one about their individual plans.

Part of the support I give students in developing their essay plans comes in the form of lazily annotated bibliographies of the additional readings on the module website. (Here's the one for Sextus.) The annotation takes the form of some grouping/tagging by topic, and (here's the intentionally lazy bit) copy-pasted text from the abstract, beginning or end where the author says what happens in the article. The idea here is to give students some help in finding readings relevant to their question, or to help them find a question by seeing debates in the literature. But the fact that the copy-pasting is lazy—I don't even clean up the formatting to fix garbled characters—is a way of demonstrating that this is exactly how I myself figure out what to read.

I worried that students wouldn't want to write their essays on Zhuāngzǐ, since that unit comes only at the end of the module, but in fact two of the eight final essays I received were about Zhuāngzǐ. (All of the others were on Sextus, but Nāgārjuna did get some substantial attention in the later Levels assignments.) This is a pretty small sample, but it does seem that Zhuāngzǐ at least captured students' interest.

Finally, let me wrap up by acknowledging I had a lot of help. I've said above that I took the idea for the Levels assignment from Dustin Locke. In coming up with the reading lists, I posted in a couple of Facebook groups (Board Certified Epistemologists and the Society for Teaching Comparative Philosophy), both of which drew very helpful suggestions. I'm especially grateful to Julianne Chung, Ethan Mills, and Xiao Ouyang, who were all generous and very encouraging!

Comments

[Chris Stephens]

Roger - the levels structure to the assignments sounds interesting.

On a slightly orthogonal note, I've tried to teach Zhuāngzǐ with Sextus before, but I've struggled to find the right bits from Zhuāngzǐ. If I can ask: what bits do you have them read from it? I've tried to pair him with the relativism discussion by Protagoras in the Theaetetus as well, but to mixed results. I assume you do the bits on the problem of the criterion - do you do a lot more than that?

[Roger Clarke]

Hi Chris! (Speaking of people I should thank for anything I know about teaching....)

Mostly we focus on Chapter 2, and that's all I require students to read, but I recommend reading all the inner chapters. Other bits of note: I tend to bring up the skill stories from chapter 3 when students are tempted toward thinking that Zhuangzi thinks we can't know anything, or that he recommends some kind of paralysis; and a bunch of the optional readings talk about the happy fish story in chapter 17. I'm not sure exactly which bits would count as being on the problem of the criterion (that's not a connection I draw explicitly), but I'd guess you have in mind the bit in chapter 2 with the "How would I know that?" dialogue. Am I close?

Our discussion of chapter 2 tends to focus on the passages starting with (in the Ziporyn translation) "But human speech is not just a blowing of air." The stuff afterward has natural parallels with perspective-relativity & sceptical non-assertion in Sextus. This Lisa Raphals article does a lot to directly compare Zhuangzi & Sextus (even though Plato's the one who makes it into the title), and my students seem to find it helpful: https://philpapers.org/rec/RAPSSI

[Chris Stephens]

Thanks, Roger! Very helpful.
c