Teaching Philosophy

I advocate the use of small group learning in the philosophy classroom because it engages a broad cross-section of students and because it proves to be an effective way to teach critical thinking. In this article, I suggest small group activities that are useful for developing philosophical skills, and I propose methods for circumventing common logistical problems that can arise when implementing small group learning in the classroom. Ultimately, I show that small group learning is a pedagogically powerful and logistically feasible supplement to traditional teaching methods.

Four anthologies covering the modern period are reviewed here and assessed with respect to whether anthologized selections and supplementary materials are useful to teachers and undergraduate students. With the exception of one anthology, each volume makes conservative choices in representing the modern period. Such choices reinforce a history of the modern period increasingly out of step with current scholarship and discourage scholarly teachers from presenting a history deeply embedded in science, psychology, education, economics, religion, mathematics, and social, political and moral philosophy. Each of the volumes has significant strengths when used in a curriculum guided by this more conservative canon, but the canon itself is problematic as an organizing principle for anthologies and curricula covering the modern period.

The purpose of this study is to examine differences in attainment of learning outcomes between students who take a class in an online format as compared to students who take a similar class in a traditional classroom setting. While on the face of it the online learners appear to attain these outcomes to a higher degree, when we control for withdrawal rates between the two groups, as well as demographic differences related to age and class standing, we see that online learners no longer outperform classroom learners. We conclude that learner outcome attainment for the two delivery formats is similar for students who are more mature and/or are experienced college students. Inexperienced college freshmen, in contrast, better attain learner outcomes in a traditional classroom setting.

Rationality has long been held to be the hallmark of what it means to be human. Consequently, the act of deductive inference—a central element of human reasoning—may be assumed to be natural. Not surprisingly, the study of formal logic has traditionally been regarded as essential for the philosophy major and recommended for many others. Yet both empirical study and pedagogical experience suggest that we deduce, on the whole, rather poorly. In fact, reasoning within formal systems seems to pose insurmountable difficulties for some students. In this article, I suggest that both classroom experience and psychological research point to the possibility of a logic-related learning disability which I refer to as inference blindness. I further suggest that the dual-mechanism theory proposed by Vinod Goel offers the best way of understanding deductive reasoning and that the application of this theory suggests a preliminary hypothesis regarding inference blindness.

This essay argues for the value of teaching a unit that questions what it is that philosophers teach as a way of encouraging students to reflect on the nature of philosophy. I show how using ancient philosophy to frame this unit makes it especially urgent, since an important (and often overlooked) consequence of Socrates’s demarcation of philosophy from oratory is that philosophers are not in a position to teach anything. I have found that students are eager to engage the challenge that this seems to pose for the contemporary philosophy classroom. Further, they can self-reflectively employ philosophical analysis to identify and critique ways of justifying what they learn from teachers of philosophy.

In this paper I discuss card games designed to supplement or replace exercise sets on derivability and entailment in propositional logic. I present rules for two propositional logic card games that introduce chance and competition into discussions of propositional logic. The latter sections provide brief practical and theoretical notes on this kind of game, including ways courses that use these games can be more effective than courses that do not.

This review discusses four recently published textbooks in health care ethics. The theme I emphasize here is that the more common health care ethics issues addressed in these texts are of enormous personal, political and professional relevance today. More specifically, these issues have been enormously socially divisive, as the rhetoric about “death panels” illustrates. A course in health care ethics ought to provide students (future citizens in a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society) with the skills they need to address these issues in a mutually respectful way with fellow citizens who disagree with them. Two of these textbooks provide a nice balance of articles over a suitable range of topics, including cases for discussion and much helpful pedagogical material. The third textbook is deficient in pedagogical resources. The fourth offers a distinctive cultural approach to addressing an array of bioethics issues, including religious perspectives.