Teaching Philosophy

It is frequently, but incorrectly, claimed that Socrates said “All I know is that I know nothing.” The source of this misquote is Plato’s dialogue the Apology, where there are five Socratic claims that may appear to justify it. I review these five claims in their context to prove that they are not equivalent to, nor do they imply, the infamous quote. What Socrates does say is that he does not think that he knows anything that he does not in fact really know. He is skeptical in a certain sense; but he is not the dogmatic and self-contradicting skeptic that he is often made out to be.

Socratic teaching is popularly understood as aggressively questioning randomly called-on students, but this is a model that many educators have moved away from. The focus has shifted to eliciting and facilitating critical dialogue among willing participants. I would argue that this helpful shift still misses an essential element of Socratic teaching that can be gleaned from some of Plato’s early dialogues. The most crucial dimension of Socrates’ pedagogy is the function of the educator as an exemplar. I develop an account of what being an exemplar amounts to, discuss how examples of this activity are present in early Platonic dialogues, and then explain how the insights gleaned from such an examination can animate Socratic pedagogy in the classroom.

What is at stake when students sell the highly sought-after basketball tickets they receive for free through a university’s lottery system? This article discusses a case in applied ethics taken from the experience of college students and extrapolates from that to the distribution of other scarce resources using lotteries. By examining an event relevant to the actual experience of students, we challenge them to see how normative moral theory may be used and what values are central to moral decision-making. The case includes four analyses from different perspectives and a teaching note.

Philosophical clarity is not simply a matter of style; it affects the quality of the thinking and writing and so the level of intellectual rigor. Achieving maximum clarity requires both intellectual and perceptual skills. The intellectual grasp of what philosophical clarity involves motivates writing with greater clarity. The perceptual skill of seeing exactly what we have written enables such improvement to occur. This paper explains a technique used in graduate-level courses to move both sets of skills, which in turn typically changes the students’ approach to writing and moves their written presentation skills quite dramatically.

In this article I describe my experience teaching a moral problems course to first-year students within a Learning Community model. I begin with the learning goals and the mechanics of both my Learning Community and my moral problems course. I then focus on the experiential learning requirement of my Learning Community which is based on a field trip model instead of a service learning model. I describe how two field trips in particular—one to an Arab American community in Brooklyn, New York, and the other to a Black American community in West Harlem, New York—primed my students to more effectively engage in philosophical discussions about terrorism, war, and affirmative action. I conclude that experiential learning on a field trip model helped my students to have more sophisticated conversations about complex and emotionally charged moral issues.

This essay provides an intuitive technique that illustrates why a conditional must be true when the antecedent is false and the consequent is either true or false. Other techniques for explaining the conditional’s truth table are unsatisfactory.