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1. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 26 > Issue: 4
Dale Lugenbehl Learning at a Deeper Level
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This paper contends that the focus on “conceptual learning” at the expense of “deeper learning” is an important and pervasive problem in educational institutions. Whereas students are able to articulate philosophical concepts and offer strong arguments for their preferred philosophical positions, these views often are not instantiated in their daily lives, e.g. they are able to articulate the importance of analyzing an argument before casting judgment on an argument, but when actually faced with an argument, they ignorance analysis for judgment. This paper provides an account of what “deeper learning” is and offers several suggestions for how to produce deeper learning in students.
2. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Corey Beals Finding Phronimos: Making a Place for Practical Wisdom in the Classroom
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Drawing upon Aristotle’s understanding of phronesis, this paper argues for the importance of listening to older people who have practical wisdom. The paper begins by responding to the objection that practical wisdom is not age-related, arguing that while advanced age is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for having practical wisdom, there is a correlation between the two. Next, the paper turns to the relevance of practical wisdom in the philosophy classroom, specifically with whether wisdom can be taught, and, if it can be taught, what is the best method for teaching it. After concluding that practical wisdom is age-related, something cultivated over a lifetime, and something that is possible to develop in the classroom, the paper describes an assignment where students engage a phronimos (a person of advanced age whom students consider has a high level of practical wisdom).
3. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
George T. Hole Pragmatic Platonism: Skillful Means for Everyday Enlightenment
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This paper describes a method and a practical exercise that offers students a glimpse of everyday enlightenment by using Socrates’ technique of questioning, Plato’s account of the ascent to the form of the good, along with an aspect of Buddha’s Eight Fold Path. The practical exercise prompts students to consider the form of honesty by considering what honesty is for them. The exercise then proceeds to a discussion of how they know they are honest and what rules one must follow to be honest. With this initial account of honesty, the paper then details a set of “proto-philosophical questions” that challenges the student to further articulate their account of honesty, to compare it to dishonesty, and to contextualize it by imagining themselves as the victim of deception or as a deceiver.
4. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
John K. Alexander Two Practical Exercises for Teaching Business and Professional Ethics
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The paper describes two practical exercises (and their learning outcomes) requiring students to consider certain concrete decisions made by managers in business and professional life. The first exercise requires students to consider that competitive economic exchange inevitably puts managers in situations where they cannot accurately predict the outcomes of their decisions, and often results in harm to innocent people. In this practical exercise, seven discussion situations are described and students are asked to make decisions that take into account the individuals affected by these managerial decisions. Students are asked to consider various ethical theories and devise creative solutions so as to avoid unnecessary harm. The second exercise places students in roles that represent shareholders and stakeholders and asks them to consider the relocation of a manufacturing company to their community.
5. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Carl Chung Enhancing Introductory Symbolic Logic with Student-Centered Discussion Projects
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This paper describes two collaborative projects that illustrate the value of learning symbolic logic and provide students (and instructors) a break from the routine work of learning new symbols or proof techniques. The first project has students work together to reconstruct the argument in Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. This project has the benefit of showing students that what they are reading in college has an underlying logical structure and that their knowledge of conditionals, conjunctions, etc. functions in real, argumentative discourse. The second project introduces students to four key concepts: self-reference, paradox, and metatheory, and then exposes them to key metatheoretic concepts (consistency and completeness) and to Gödel’s incompleteness proof.
6. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Katarzyna Paprzycka Teaching Logic as a Foreign Language On-Line
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Similar to learning the grammatical structures of a foreign language, one problem that students face in learning logic is that many of the operations and concepts they need to learn require more practice to fully master. To solve this problem, the author proposes the use of “repetitive exercises”, exercises that aim to develop a familiarity with a concept or operation through repeatedly focusing on that concept or operation. According to the author, the best method for implementing these exercises is the use of on-line teaching environments, specifically WebCT, which allows instructors to develop exercises that they deem appropriate and allows for mechanical grading. Finally, the paper provides an overview of why WebCT is preferable to the use of Blackboard, and notes that the major drawback to the online solution is its poor support for the symbols used in propositional and predicate logic.
7. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Charles Twardy Argument Maps Improve Critical Thinking
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This paper describes the Reason! method of argument mapping (along with the associated Reason!Able software) and measures its effect on the California Critical Thinking Skills Test. The result of the author’s study is that students who use the Reason! method, rather than other methods of teaching critical thinking skills, perform better on the California test. What accounts for the effectiveness of Reason! method is its use of argument maps, a method of representing arguments using a two-dimensional diagram involving boxes and arrows. In addition to describing the method, and presenting empirical data that supports the Reason! approach, the author provides an assessment of the various strengths and weaknesses of the method and details its use at the University of Melbourne.
8. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Chris McCord Frankenstein Meets Kant (and the Problem of Wide Duties)
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This paper describes how an ethics instructor might use Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to teach Kant’s duty-based ethics. For example, themes like the lack of beneficence of Victor toward his creature and Victor’s uneven development of his talents can be used to introduce students to criticisms of Kant’s view that beneficence is an imperfect (or wide) duty or that we have an imperfect duty to cultivate, not only our scientific abilities, but also non-scientific ones. In addition, “Frankenstein” can be used to consider Kant’s prohibition on making false promises, physically abusing one’s body, suicide, as well as Kant’s stance on the abuse of non-rational animals.
9. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Rick Fairbanks Studying Science in Action: The Case for Using Cases in Teaching the Philosophy of Science
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This paper describes the case-based approach to teaching philosophy of science courses and argues for its merits. The paper first presents a case study that debates whether the “shock features” of the Slate Islands in Lake Superior were formed by meteorite impact or have an endogenous origin, e.g. from explosive volcanic activity. Next, the virtues of the Slate-Island case are considered, e.g. the case is focused insofar as what is at stake is relatively clear and the case illustrates the truisms that creditable scientists disagree and the claims made in natural science are probable rather than indubitable. Finally, the paper argues for the case-based approach to teaching the philosophy of science by responding to two objections: (i) that case studies get in the way of doing philosophy and (ii) that students won’t be able to understand scientific literature well enough to reflect upon how it relates to science in general.
10. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
James B. Gould Consenting Adults?: A Strategy for Discussing Unwanted Sex
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This paper reports on a pedagogical strategy used when discussing consensual and non-consensual sex in college ethics courses. The paper outlines a general teaching technique designed to elicit what students already think about a particular issue and then applies this general technique to the seven specific cases involving unwanted sex. Classroom results on these cases are described, reporting that students tend to adopt two different definitions of what it means for sex to be “consensual”. A commentary on these cases is provided that can be used to encourage students to think through the cases critically, and the author provides a brief commentary on how these cases relate to the notion of autonomy.
11. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Mitch Avila Justice, Care, and Ideology in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
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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.
12. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Peter R. Costello Walter Benjamin and Cinema Paradiso: Teaching Aura, Loss, and Recovery
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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.
13. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 3
Brook J. Sadler How Important Is Student Participation in Teaching Philosophy?
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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.
14. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Steven M. Cahn Teaching Graduate Students to Teach
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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.
15. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Katarzyna Paprzycka Using Short Animated Presentations (SAPs) in Teaching Elementary Logic
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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.
16. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Karen D. Hoffman Responses to Despair: Teaching Kierkegaard, Camus, and Orwell
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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.
17. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
David W. Concepción Reading Philosophy with Background Knowledge and Metacognition
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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.
18. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Carol V. A. Quinn Moral and Pedagogical Reflections on Coming Out in the Classroom
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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.
19. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 27 > Issue: 4
Richard Schmitt Is the Unexamined Life Not Worth Living?
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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.
20. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 28 > Issue: 1
Andrew P. Mills Leopold and Loeb and an Interdisciplinary Introduction to Philosophy
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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”.