Teaching Philosophy

While there is much extant literature on “case method” pedagogy as practiced in law and business education, there is little written on its use in teaching practical (i.e. professional or applied) ethics. After relating the history and nature of the case method in law, business, and philosophy, the author offers guidance on how to develop and use philosophy cases, focusing on lesson plans for their presentation, their purpose within the practical ethics curriculum, and how to write and grade course requirements involving them. Much more than the examples philosophers typically invent (designed to illustrate a point or bring discussion to a close), philosophy cases are highly varied, promoting discussion and sensitivity to complex ethical situations. The author argues that since the goal of a practical ethics course is to most often to familiarize people with the special standards of conduct that apply to members of a certain group (e.g. doctors, lawyers, academics), philosophy cases should encourage the expression of ethical opinions, encourage students to identify issues within cases and to make decisions that account for ethical complexities, promote students’ ability to justify those decisions convincingly, and develop in students a sense of how to incorporate feasibility into the moral decision-making process.

Teachers of critical thinking courses are justified in teaching some amount of propositional logic, especially logical equivalence and formal proofs for validity, but the otherwise informal nature of most critical thinking courses makes it difficult to decide how much propositional logic should enter a course. Most instructors use truth tables to teach the above two topics but they are too off-putting to be useful to most critical thinking students (as are derivations, the common alternative to truth tables). This paper presents an accessible alternative to truth tables, namely, Peirce’s Existential Graphs. Detailing only what one needs to know about Existential Graphs in order to test propositions for logical equivalence and deductive argument forms for validity, this paper describes how they work, their terminology, their inference rules, and several examples which may aid in demonstrating their use to students.

Drawing on the work of John Dewey (but addressing non-foundational epistemologies generally), the author argues that if academic philosophers take seriously the claim that theory and practice are reciprocally determined, then they should take seriously the task of intelligently experimenting with teaching practices in order to refine theories of knowledge and, on this basis, improve teaching practices. This paper explores one way of relating non-foundational epistemology to classroom practices. The author elaborates a “transactional” model of knowledge, according to which knowledge is what arises from historically- and contextually-situated agents interacting with each other and the world. One pedagogical application of this model is a “transactional classroom.” Such a classroom employs “Group Inquiry,” a teaching strategy that involves the teacher and students sharing responsibility for the results of inquiry as well as for the development of standards to which inquiry is held. After detailing several courses built on this teaching strategy and offering advice for avoiding a foundationalist position in the classroom, the author addresses criticisms of this teaching method and reflects on its results. With the help of student surveys, the author concludes that while students found these courses demanding, Group Inquiry successfully decentralized the classroom and improved student participation.