This paper describes how the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” can be used in the classroom. Drawing on Gilligan’s theory of moral psychology, the paper begins by putting forward a new interpretation of the film. While the central theme of the film is that of miscegenation, another salient topic in the film concerns how to maintain patriarchal privilege in a society that has racial equality. The paper then proceeds to illustrate different ways the film can be used in the classroom, most importantly to illustrate the justice/care distinction. Finally, the pedagogical practice of showing films that support certain ideologies is critically examined.

This paper describes how the author teaches Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by using the 1988 movie “Cinema Paradiso.” The film and Benjamin’s text are used to discuss topics like alienation, the production of meaning in one’s life, and the outmoded nature of concepts like creativity, genius, and eternal value, etc. Whereas students begin by agreeing with the thrust of Benjamin’s text, they end by being in conflict with their strong reaction to the end of “Cinema Paradiso” and the view that aesthetic items like films are merely matters of taste.

Student participation is essential to philosophy since dialogue is at the center of philosophical activity: it provides students an opportunity to articulate their philosophical ideas, it helps them connect philosophy to their practical experience, it serves as an opportunity for instructors to take an interest in their students’ views, and it promotes intellectual virtues like courage and honesty. However, lectures can serve many of the same functions, albeit in different ways, e.g. a lecturer can engage other historical philosophers so as to illustrate various dialogues in the history of philosophy. This paper argues that both student participation via dialogue and traditional lecturing play important roles in university education and attempts to offer guidance on how to strike a balance between lecture-driven and student-driven instruction.

This paper describes a fourteen-week course titled “Teaching Philosophy” whose goal was to prepare new teachers on how to provide effective instruction to undergraduates. The author recounts a number of the benefits that result from teaching new instructors how to teach: slower and clearer instruction, better attention to motivating topics, as well as the capacity to present material in a more organized way. In addition to providing feedback from students who took the course, the author contends that these types of courses provide an important step toward more effective teaching.

This paper describes existing and potential short animated presentations that may be helpful in introductory logic courses (particularly in conjunction with Virginia Klenk’s "Understanding Symbolic Logic"), e.g. the progression of a proof, the distinction between inference and replacement rules, propositional variables, the use of truth tables, etc. The author offers reasons why animated presentations of various concepts and derivation rules ought to be short and simple rather than long and complex, provides an overview of some of the technical limitations associated with such presentations, and discusses the prospects for developing future presentations.

Whereas many philosophy courses focus upon the problem that skeptical doubts can play in knowledge claims, Kierkegaard suggests that the problem of despair is a much more significant as it encompasses not only the intellect but the entire person. This paper details this problem in the context of Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness Unto Death”, Camus’s “The Plague”, and Orwell’s “1984” (a list of suggested pages from these books is also provided). While the author discusses how this problem was broached in a seminar on Kierkegaard, themes of this course could be integrated into a number of other philosophy courses, e.g. Existentialism, Philosophy of Literature, Introduction to Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Religion.

This paper argues that explicit reading instruction should be part of lower level undergraduate philosophy courses. Specifically, the paper makes the claim that it is necessary to provide the student with both the relevant background knowledge about a philosophical work and certain metacognitive skills (e.g. their ability to reflect on the learning process) that enrich the reading process and their ability to organize the content of a philosophical text with other aspects of knowledge. A “How to Read Philosophy” handout and student reactions to the handout are provided.

This paper discusses issues involved with revealing one’s sexual orientation, cultural background, or religious beliefs to one’s students. The author takes a Deweyian approach to learning, where learning is an active, embedded practice rooted in life. As such, coming out in the classroom can have positive benefits for learning since the practice of revealing one’s sexual orientation to a group of students can be used to help students think philosophically about their life choices and, in addition, promote a more supportive intellectual community.

This paper examines the merits of the Socratic maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. First, the maxim is considered in its purely subjective sense, viz., that a particular individual’s life is not worth living due to factors like intense pain or illness. Second, two objective interpretations of the maxim are considered: a “strongly objective sense” where failure to examine one’s life means that one is wasting it and a “moderately objective sense” where it is reasonable to recommend that examining one’s life goals comes will come with a greater understanding of appreciation of said goals (with the caveat that other reasonable people may reject these goals as being worthwhile). After delineating the different senses in which the maxim can be understood, the author distinguishes two different varieties of self-examination and considers in what sense the Socratic maxim rings true and in what sense it exaggerates.

This paper describes an interdisciplinary course on the philosophy of human nature that centers on the famous 1924 kidnapping-ransom-murder case involving Leopold and Loeb . After recounting the details of the “perfect crime” of Leopold and Loeb, the course is structured around five units: (i) free will/determinism, (ii) the debate between retributivists and therapeutic approaches to punishment, (iii) the morality of the death penalty, (iv) Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and “slave moralities”, and (v) homosexuality. In addition to being truly interdisciplinary, the course promotes the critical evaluation of a variety of non-philosophical (films, novels, plays, courtroom transcripts) works and shows how philosophy can play a role in making sense of the “real world”.

Many students find themselves caught in an antinomy between “Rationalism”, a view of the world as open to objective, complete, and intellectual comprehension, and “Anti-realism”, the view that the Rationalist vision is façade since there is no objective perspective and any “truth” is relative to the individual. This paper offers a description of an introductory course that provides conceptual resources (through the use of Descartes, Hume, and Kant) for resolving the Rationalism-Antirealism debate. Such conceptual resources include: the representation/reality distinction, the fact/evidence disparity, the nature of skepticism, Kant’s distinction between Transcendental Idealism and Transcendental Realism, and the subject/object dichotomy.

This paper inquires into the nature and causes of credulous belief and proposes a way of making negative evidence more salient to believers so that they are less likely to fall into the habit of credulous believing. Contrasting the work of Richard Swinburne with recent work in cognitive psychology, the author argues that for the “strong credulity hypothesis”, namely that our comprehension of testimony is closely linked to an initial (albeit temporary) acceptance of what speakers claim. That is, we are literally “set up” to believe irrespective of whether the belief in question is reasonable. In order to “neutralize” the effect of initial credulity, the author describes a pro/con procedure (suitable for a number of classes, e.g. critical thinking) that allows for the systematic analysis of beliefs and testimony.

This paper offers a number of tips for teaching small philosophy classes (under twenty-five students). Some of these include using a horseshoe seating arrangement, replacing hand-raising with name cards, engaging in “real” Socratic dialogues, having students create a philosophical “Question of the Day”, and assigning students “Critical Response” papers.

Drawing on the work of Linda Farmer, this article describes a detailed grading grid coupled with a rubric designed for the purpose of assessing argumentative papers. The rubric consists of two main parts: Content and Style. Relying upon Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, the “Content” part of the rubric assesses a student’s understanding of the material, the argument of their paper, and various abilities concerning analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and creation. The “Style” part of the rubric is split into two parts: Clarity and Organization. Coupling this rubric with a grading grid, the author provides an example of a method for the effective grading of argumentative essays.

The author reports on an effort to transform traditional top-down, instructor-centered philosophy courses into courses that are open, learning-centered, and work toward a cooperative goal. After providing the underlying rationale for cooperative philosophy courses, the author describes a cooperative philosophy course where students were assigned with individually (and cooperatively) answering the question “What is Philosophy?” by creating introductory philosophy textbooks. The author provides details on how to guide students to the creation of such introductory textbooks with a variety of practical classroom exercises and suggestions for assessment. Finally, potential future applications for cooperative learning courses are discussed.

The author describes a peripatetic course aiming at undermining ethnocentric biases that are at the root of certain failures of miscommunication. The course involves a description of two semiotic models (the Saussarian and Peircean) and their application to cases of communication involving radical cultural difference, specifically the interpretive efforts of both conquering Spaniards and conquered Native Americans. Since the Peircean semiotic model requires a contextual-understanding of the Other in order for successful communication, the author contends that it is necessary for philosophy courses to be both historically oriented and provide greater global awareness. To this end, the author gives an account of a philosophy course involving ten American liberal arts students who retrace the route of Spanish conquistadors form Veracruz to Mexico City and that of Dominican missionaries from Oaxaca to Chiapas.

A guiding thread in Western thought is that the world has a mathematical structure. This essay articulates this thread by making use of a cardboard teaching aid that illustrates the Pythagorean Theorem and uses this teaching aid as a starting point for discussion about a variety of philosophical and historical topics. To name just a few, the aid can be used to segue into a discussion of the Pythagorean association of shapes with numbers, the nature of deductive argumentation, the demonstration of part of the Theorem in the Meno, the possible origin of the Theorem in Egypt, the influence of Pythagoreans upon Plato, or even the relation of the Pythagorean Theorem to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Many undergraduates, philosophy majors included, read philosophical texts similar to the way they read stories. One method for teaching students how to discern the argumentative structure of a philosophy text is through argument diagrams (text boxes used to represent claims with arrows and lines used to represent connections between these claims). This paper provides criteria for an ideal argument diagramming software and then reviews the strengths and weaknesses of such software currently available, e.g. Araucaria, Argutect, Athena Standard, Inspiration, and Reason!Able.

In contrast to traditional content management systems (CMS), TikiWiki (or Tiki for short) is a CMS that not only includes discussion forums, messaging, webmail, chat, file and image galleries, blogs, etc. but also Wikis (an online user-created encyclopedia). Two benefits of using Tiki are that it provides an integrated place where course content like syllabi and handouts can be accessed but also chat and discussion forum functionalities allow for better instructor-student or student-student collaboration. Whereas the former saves departments money with respect to printing, the latter is a practical use of technology in distance learning courses. The author outlines his use of Tiki to teach a distance learning logic course at three to six Kent State campuses as well as offers suggestions (and some cautionary remarks) for how to use Tiki in upper-level seminars in the philosophy. Finally, technical, legal, and pedagogical issues in the use of Tiki like information security and student privacy are discussed.

Biological scientists are increasingly encountering work-related ethical problems. For most, their training leaves them quite unprepared. Rather than merely providing additional bolt-on courses in ethics, a way of introducing critical thinking skills seamlessly into the curriculum is proposed. A method is described whereby students become engaged in self-generated discussion about the scientifically recognized, but philosophically complex, terms ‘disease’ and ‘health.’ Addressing these words, students are confrontedwith the need to develop critical thinking skills without realizing that they are entering into overt philosophical argument—the like of which many often prejudge to be abstract and worthless.