The Philosophers' Cocoon

How to open up "Introduction to Philosophy" classes to Global Philosophy?

My ideal curriculum for an Intro class in Philosophy is the one conceived by Jay Garfield and others and taught by Malcolm Keating and others at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, namely a completely non-Eurocentric introductory class (they have three main foci, namely Sanskrit, Chinese and European philosophy).

 

But, what to do until we get there?

Intro classes are (in the universities I know of) meant both for outsiders who only take one class of philosophy as well as for students who will chose philosophy as their major. Thus, the Intro class has at least also the purpose to put students in the position to follow their next classes.

Thus, in this sense a completely unconventional Intro class might be risky because students and professors might resent the fact that by the time they enrolled for, say, "Medieval philosophy" or "Philosophy of language" they did not know about basic names and theories. 

Now, again, in an ideal world the whole faculty will agree about rethinking its teaching style around the fact that "Plato" and "ethics" should not be more obvious requirements than "Confucius" and "philosophy of ritual", but, again, what to do until we are there? 

• Possibility no. 1: Disrupt the curriculum completely (see above). Cool but unrealistic.
• Possibility no. 2: Leave the Intro class(es) as it is/they are (thematic or historic and Euro-American focused). Students have too much on their plate already. Let's diversify later. Cool but unrealistic: students will have unconsciously swallowed the idea that there is just ONE philosophy that is "normal" and the rest is there to "colour it up".
• Possibility no. 3: Insert snippets of other philosophical worlds. Why, given that this would be done in a non systematic manner and hence not be as powerful insofar as paradigm building? Because it will at least force students to notice that there is not a single way of doing philosophy. Students I have been teaching in North America are more open than I expected to this idea, but they need to be exposed to examples early on to be able to seriously consider it. 

So, 3 seems still much better than 1. But this leads to further problems re. its feasibility. Which texts? Taught by whom? How?…

Teaching Bullshit and Assholes - Part 1 (Guest Post by C. Thi Nguyen and Imree Parma)

Teaching “On Bullshit”

by C. Thi Nguyen

I recently taught a "Bullshit and Assholes Week" in my introductory ethics class, and just had a lifetime peak teaching experience. It was for my first attempt at teaching Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". Raw, pure, unrefined teaching ecstasy.

I was actually prepping for the class the day before and totally freaking out that I'd picked something too hard for gen-ed, intro ethics – that it was too dry and too tediously analytic. But it turned out to be a TOTAL DELIGHT. It is, in fact, a perfect way to introduce students to conceptual analysis. Because the article is, I now realize, this perfect escalation of gradually improving attempts at getting the right analysis of "bullshit," in a wonderfully teachable sequence.

First pass: is bullshit the same as lying? The answer: no, because there's plenty of bullshit (administrative red tape) that's not lying. Second pass: is bullshit pretentious lying? No, because some bullshit is pretentious, but not lying (excessively precious artisanal-signaling food). And some bullshit involves lying, but no pretension.

The moment the article really hit, for my students, is when Frankfurt proposes the account that bullshit is bullshit because it is sloppy. And the students all saw it at the same moment: that excessively precious artisanal-signaling food may be bullshit, but it is certainly not sloppy. In fact, it is bullshit because *too much care has been put into it," perhaps in the wrong sort of way. And so "bullshit" needs to be an abstract enough concept so that it encompasses some bullshit which is bullshit because it is sloppy, and other bullshit which is bullshit because it is too carefully crafted.

When the students saw it, they were, like, jaws agape in illumination and pleasure. I think they went from laughing at the fact that the professor was talking about bullshit, to laughing at how deep the analysis could go.

How to teach introductory logic to undergraduates - a guest post by Sara Uckelman

This is the first in a two-part post by Sara Uckelman of the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. It first appeared on her blog, Diary of Doctor Logic. We're grateful to her for allowing us to repost it here.

I am quite optimistic about the prospects for the students in my tutorial group, and at the urging of a friend, I'm going to reflect on the things that I've done that I feel have had positive impact.

First, a bit about the course: The course runs from Michaelmas term (October to December) all the way through the start of Easter term, and has a one hour lecture, once a week, and a one hour tutorial with groups of 12-13 students, once a week. Thus, we get 44 contact hours over the course of the year. The course this year has six tutorial groups, of which I am in charge of one, and most of my comments in this post are going to be directed at things I do in my tutorials, because the one on one contact students get with me I think is just as valuable, if not more so, than what they learn from me in lectures.

Barriers to learning logic: Two common barriers to learning logic are (a) laziness and (b) fear.

(a) Logic is a cumulative endeavour that cannot be done without regular practice. It cannot. A lot of undergraduate students do not have much experience with working hard, over and over, at something until they learn how to do it, and so do not realize just how important this is. A lot of people who do poorly at undergraduate level do so because they simply never devoted enough time to it. Because we have weekly tutorials in my class, there are correspondingly weekly assignments that students are expected to do, giving them ample opportunity to practice. But while you can lead a student to water, you cannot necessarily make them drink...We'll come back to this below.

(b) Many undergraduate are negatively predisposed to anything that smacks of math. Maybe they haven't done math since GSCEs, or did poorly in math in high school. The method of learning something via definitions and rules is very foreign to the usual practice of philosophy, a practice which undergraduate students are predisposed to, because otherwise they wouldn't be doing philosophy at the university level. The use of unfamiliar symbols and things from the Greek alphabet can be very off-putting. (I made a point of telling all my students to go look up the Greek alphabet on wikipedia the first week of lecture, and to start learning how to recognize and draw the letter forms.) Both laziness and fear need to be counteracted in order for students to be able to succeed in a logic course.

Teaching Intro Courses Series - Part 1: Stacey Goguen's Introduction to Ethics

by Stacey Goguen

Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), lower-division gen. ed. course: “Ethics”

The Context

I teach at a medium-sized public university (7,000-8,000 students) which caters to a racially and socio-economically diverse population of mostly Chicago-area residents, especially (a) students looking to transfer, either from more expensive nearby schools or community colleges, (b) non-traditional students who are either working part or full time or who had to take a break from completing college, and (c) first-time college students who need a fair amount of academic support and advising, often because they’re first generation college students.

Class sizes for our lower-division classes are capped at 35 students, and since my teaching load is 3/3 and I often have at least one course under 20 students, my grading load is manageable in itself, which means I can assign more writing than I could with a larger grading load. However, because a lot of my students are under constant time-crunches (mostly from working), and they don’t often have experience with writing long papers (5+ pages), I tend to assign shorter writing assignments (usually 1-2 pages, 3-4 pages max).

The Course

I have taught an introduction to ethics course (called “Ethics”) four times over the past two years. Two things I do that are unusual are that (a) the content revolves around applied ethics, though I still incorporate metaethics, and (b) the major writing assignments do not focus on building and critiquing arguments, though students do some of that, too.

Below are my course goals, and I’m going to try something unusual with them, too: breaking them into primary, secondary, and tertiary goals—because I think that will help explain how I think about this course. Primary goals are what I put on my syllabi; they are what I consider absolutely necessary for myself and my students to accomplish. Secondary goals are things I want at least some students in the course to get, especially if they are planning to be majors—but it’s not crucial for all students to meet them. Tertiary goals are ‘frosting on the cake’: it’s great if students meet them, but if not, I don’t consider it a huge problem.

Unusual Intro Courses: Call for participants for a new series

How do you teach an intro level course, such as Introduction to Philosophy? Many of us have considerable freedom in organizing our courses in the way we see fit. There are so many possible ways to approach this material that it boggles the mind. 

There has been a lot of recent discussion on Shen-yi Liao's unorthodox (at least in some respects) intro-level philosophy course, see e.g., here and in the Comments section on the Daily Nous blogpost, as well as Prof. Liao's follow-up post, here. Discussion has focused on what should be included in Intro level courses, to what extent we need to cover the classics, and how we can diversify the syllabus. 

As the Philosophers' Cocoon aims to be a forum of advice for early-career (and not-so-early career) philosophers, we are starting a new series "How do you teach Intro-level courses?" In this series, we want to showcase the many ways in which one can approach intro-level courses, in particular Introduction to Philosophy.

So we want to hear from you, reader. We want to hear about the orthodox, the unusual, the outlandish, the hyper-focused-on-one-philosopher, the thought-provoking assignments. You are free to structure your contribution however you like, but we suggest the following elements to be present:

1. The context: At what kind of place do you teach (e.g., a state university in the midwest, an elite liberal arts college)? What is the class size for this course? What is the student body like?
2. The course: Please describe briefly how you approach the course. We are in particular looking for Intro to Philosophy courses but any intro-level course (e.g., Intro to Ethics, Intro to Philosophy of Science, Intro to History of Philosophy) is welcome. Give an overview of some of the readings, topics, and assignments
3. The motivation: Why did you choose to structure your intro course this way?
4. How do students respond: What is the reaction of students? How do they engage with the materials? 

We hope this series will accomplish the following aims: 

• Give a sense of the wide diversity of ways you can teach an intro-level philosophy course
• Give new ideas to anyone who is looking for inspiration to revamp their course 

If it works out well, we might do future series on how people teach other kinds of courses (not intro-level, graduate seminars etc.) But for now, we want to focus on the intro! 

Please contact Marcus Arvan (marvan at ut.edu) or Helen De Cruz (hde-cruz at brookes.ac.uk) if you want to be featured for this series, or comment below.