Overcoming our disciplinary aversion to assessment mechanisms allows more possibilities for students to achieve fundamental philosophical skills. My essay discusses the use of Bloom’s taxonomy in a Feminist Philosophy course with detailed examples that demonstrate its efficacy as a learning and assessment tool that is particularly suited to philosophy, as well as how critical philosophy in general, and feminist philosophy in particular, is an ideal subject to help students gain critical thinking skills.

Often viewed as the deep common core of all religions, spirituality has been addressed in a direct philosophical manner only occasionally. After noting some recent philosophical literature, a questionnaire for evaluating a person’s spirituality is described, and a general theory of spirituality is advanced. Spirituality is, generally, the yearning for, quest for, experience of or belief in a great reality that is largely beyond ordinary experience and that inspires one’s interior, private life and one’s behavior and ultimate values. This idea illuminates the main questions of the philosophy of religion, and also questions of the consistency of thought and action, essentialism, naturalism, religious liberalism, and the reproductive fallacy.

This paper reports the results of an assessment project conducted in a semester-length course in environmental ethics. The first goal of the project was to measure the degree to which the course succeeded in meeting its overarching goal of enriching students’ moral imagination and its more particular objectives relating to ethics in the built environment. The second goal of the project was to contribute toward a broader effort to develop assessment tools for ethics education. Through qualitative analysis of an exit survey and of a pair of writing assignments, the study yielded some promising results, outlined here, and suggested particular ways of improving both the course and the assessment procedure.

Recent moral philosophy emphasizes both the particularity of ethical contexts and the complexity of human character, but the usual abstract examples make it difficult to communicate to students the importance of this particularity and complexity. Extended study of a literary text in ethics classes can help overcome this obstacle and enrich our students’ understanding and practice of mature ethical reflection. Jane Austen’s Persuasion is an ideal text for this kind of effort. Persuasion augments the resources for ethical reflection that students bring to our courses, provides a multitude of fecund examples to inspire discussion, and introduces philosophical points of its own. I explain specific ways to integrate this novel into courses and why some approaches work better than others, and I highlight themes for three different levels of study: reflection on particular virtues and vices, illustration of broader ethical issues, and discussion of virtues that the philosophical literature neglects. In each case, I discuss a particular example in detail: the question of whether or not pride can be a virtue, the varieties of friendship and their relation to virtue, and the virtue of proper persuadability. These examples suggest ways in which ethics teachers might explore the resources of other literary works towards similar ends.

Moral experience may be parsed at different levels of abstraction. We might work variously at the level of meta-ethical reflection; normative ethics; the principles, doctrines, and character traits of everyday morality; or the sometimes simple, sometimes messy, business of actual moral judgment. We should strive to be clear with our students (and ourselves) about the differences between these levels and the hazards of crudely conflating them.

Peer Instruction is a simple and effective technique you can use to make lectures more interactive, more engaging, and more effective learning experiences. Although well known in science and mathematics, the technique appears to be little known in the humanities. In this paper, we explain how Peer Instruction can be applied in philosophy lectures. We report the results from our own experience of using Peer Instruction in undergraduate courses in philosophy, formal logic, and critical thinking. We have consistently found it to be a highly effective method of improving the lecture experience for both students and the lecturer.

What are some of the most useful tools and techniques for teaching about suicide? How can this topic be used to deepen students’ understanding of Socrates and existentialism? Which concepts, skills, and exercises can facilitate student interest and insight? This essay will explore Socrates’ Apology as a means to teach analytical issues on suicide, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus to teach existentialist issues, and finally the cases of Kurt Cobain and Ludwig van Beethoven to teach the application of existentialist issues.

Through examples of embodied and learning-centered pedagogy, we discuss transformative learning of transgressive topics. We begin with ataxonomy of types of learning our students undergo as they resolve inconsistencies among their pre-existing beliefs and the material they confront in our course on feminist ethics and epistemology. We then discuss ways to help students maximize their learning while confronting internal inconsistencies. While we focus on feminist topics, our approach is broad enough to be relevant to anyone teaching a transgressive or controversial topic.

In this article I claim that service-learning experiences, wherein students work directly with individuals in need—individuals from whom studentscan learn what they cannot learn elsewhere—are invaluable, and perhaps necessary, for any curriculum with an aim toward the development of ethical understanding, personal moral character and commitment, and/or conscientious citizenship, both local and global. My argument rests on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethical theory that re-envisions the ethical relation as arising out of revelation from the unique and precious Other, rather than reason and the rational determinations and conceptions of the ethical agent.

What should individuals do when their firmly held moral beliefs are prima facie inconsistent with their religious beliefs? In this article weoutline several ways of posing such consistency challenges and offer a detailed taxonomy of the various responses available to someone facing a consistency challenge of this sort. Throughout the paper, our concerns are primarily pedagogical: how best to pose consistency challenges in the classroom, how to stimulate discussion of the various responses to them, and how to relate such consistency challenges to larger issues, such as whether scripture is, in general, a reliable guide to truth.

This paper discusses the uses of technology in teaching philosophy courses. Where technology is currently utilized, it can be intrinsicallyappropriate or instrumentally inappropriate as a methodology for producing greater student interest, engagement, and positive outcomes. The paper introduces an easily implemented assignment where students produce videos on DVDs in partial fulfillment of requirements for philosophy courses. I argue that, used in philosophy courses, this assignment allows students to be creative, fosters peer dialogue about philosophy, creates excitement in these courses, and decreases the intergenerational distance between paper-bound and lecture courses with the burgeoning world of media-driven technologies. After experimenting with this assignment strategy for several years, I have concluded that the DVD project assignment is an innovative, effective, and simple technological tool for teaching philosophy.

Philosophers sometimes hope that our discipline will be transformative for students, perhaps especially when we teach so-called philosophy of the body. To that end, this article describes an experimental upper-level undergraduate course cross-listed between Philosophy and Physical Education, entitled “Thinking Through the Body: Philosophy and Yoga.” Drawing on the perspectives of professor and students, we show how a somatic practice (here, hatha yoga) and reading texts (here, primarily contemporary phenomenology) can be integrated in teaching and learning. We suggest that the course raised questions about the ethics of evaluation as well as about the split between theory and practice, which have larger pedagogical implications.

This article is an introduction to classroom response systems (“clickers”) for philosophy lecture courses. The article reviews how clickers can help re-engage students after their attention fades during a lecture, can provide student contributions that are completely honest and free of peer pressure, and can give faculty members a rapid understanding of student understanding of material. Several specific applications are illustrated including using clicker questions to give students an emotional investment in a topic, to stimulate discussion, to display change of attitudes, and to allow for the use of the peer instruction technique, which combines lectures and small groups.

The conception of thought as a kind of argumentative dialogue has been influential in curricula designed to promote the development of thinking skills. Educators have sought to “teach” this kind of thinking by providing their students with opportunities to participate in argumentative exchange. This practice is based on the belief that thinking processes will mirror or mimic the interpersonal exchanges in which the thinker engages. In this article, another approach to teaching argumentative thought is developed. It is argued that while training and practice in interpersonal argumentation increases students’ overall argumentation skills, it is not particularly effective in helping students to develop the practice of engaging dialogically with their own beliefs. On this other approach, students are required to engage in “metacognitive inquiry” in which their own judgments in respect of curriculum materials, and in respect of the various strategies they have deployed to generate these judgments, become a subject matter for reflection and critical evaluation. The article concludes with the discussion of an in-class experiment in using the metacognitive approach.

Teaching Kantian ethics is difficult, for “getting Kant right” extends to a wide field of concerns. This paper is aimed at instructors who wish to give interdisciplinary criticism of Kantian deontology by discussing exceptions naturalist critics take to Kant’s concept of “autonomy.” This concept can and should be supplanted by the notion of “emergent intelligence.” Surprising support for this project comes from the fictional exploits of Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I conclude by indicating how the residual lessons from this criticism of Kant should lead us back to an understanding of emergence within Kant’s own third Critique.

Fair grading is modeled on two fundamental principles. The first principle is that grading should be impartial and consistent. The second principle is that a fair grade should be based on the student’s competence in the academic content of the course. I derive corollary principles of fair grading from these two basic principles and use them to evaluate common grading practices. I argue that exempting students from completing certain grade components is unfair, as is grading on attendance, class rank, deportment,tardiness, effort, institutional values, moral virtues such as cheerfulness and helpfulness, and other non-course-content criteria.

This paper discusses the use of the Socratic Method by philosophy instructors. I argue that Socrates employs both dissimulation and irony in enacting the elenchus and that these techniques should be evaluated before being used in the classroom. Dissimulation can be justified as it encourages students to think for themselves, however the use of irony is ill-advised as it is readily perceived as being boastful. Suggestions are made regarding how confrontational the Socratic instructor should be in encouraging students to developaccounts of their beliefs. Lastly, I consider how the instructor’s broader philosophical commitments can influence the enactment of the elenchus.

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.

“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.