Teaching Philosophy

“But,” “however,” and “although” are among the most common words in a large family that, following Fogelin, I call discounts. Students universally take them to be inference indicators, like “because,” and “therefore.” While this is incorrect, paying attention to discounts can help us identify arguments. Unfortunately, accounts given by both logicians and linguists are at best unhelpful, at worst incorrect, and sometimes even inconsistent. After justifying these criticisms, I give an account that distinguishes discounts from inference indicators while doing justice to students’ hunch that they can help us identify arguments.

In this article, I outline a teaching demonstration that lasts approximately twenty-two minutes, which a candidate can employ when interviewing for a position in ethics. Since job openings in ethics, and especially applied ethics, are becoming increasingly common, I think that this outline will be helpful to many candidates deliberating about the topic and structure of their future teaching demonstrations. This demonstration is also especially well-suited to a search at a teaching institution, whether a community college, state college, or state university, where faculty and administration place more emphasis on success in pedagogy than success in research and publication. In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions for ways to adapt this outline for a longer teaching demo.

In this paper, we present an especially effective tool for helping students to learn and apply the skills of critical reasoning. Our Writing Portfolio Project is a set of nine progressively staged writing assignments that guide students through the formulation and development of an argumentative paper. The set of assignments are designed to reinforce, reintroduce, and repeat critical reasoning skills. In this paper, we articulate the potential uses for the Writing Portfolio Project, give a brief explanation of the reasoning behind the format of the project, and indicate ways one might implement the Writing Portfolio Project into one’s curriculum.

I present an in-class exercise (one full class, then discussions in subsequent classes) designed to help establish a community experience useful in discussions of economic, social and political philosophy. Students engage in a “poker market,” trading playing cards to assemble particular “hands” that are valuable, as an analog to the libertarian free market. Various alterations to the basic rules can be instituted, or just discussed, as ways to explore different philosophies of socio-political organization in an accessible and relevant manner for students.

Given the significance of developments in the philosophy of science over the course of the twentieth century and their centrality to philosophy in general, the appeal of teaching the philosophy of science at the introductory level is compelling. But given the abstract and sometimes technical nature of its problems and approaches, teaching this curriculum at the introductory level is bound to be challenging. This challenge has been admirably taken on by a number of authorsin recent years. In this article I will examine four recent introductory texts in the philosophy of science. While the philosophy of science has a fairly stable core curriculum, we will find that it admits of a variety of approaches.