First-Year “Proseminars” in Philosophy Grad Programs
Many philosophy graduate programs have a course all of their first-year students are supposed to take together. They go by different names at different institutions (proseminars, first-year seminars), have different content from school to school, of course, and even different aims.
In a post on the subject at Crooked Timber, Gina Schouten (Harvard), who will be teaching the Spring term half of Harvard Philosophy’s year-long first-year seminar, says
It seems to me that there are so many valuable things that a class like this might aim to accomplish, and a wide range of ways it might be put together to realize combinations of aims.
She shares what she is aiming to do with her course:
- offer “opportunities for grads to practice learning with and from each other, with relatively light teacherly oversight”
- “help [students] appreciate how broad is the range of questions toward which we can fruitfully direct philosophical thinking”
- “dispel the seeming obviousness of some philosophical commitments that apparently seem obvious right now”
- provide opportunities “for the students to get to know some of the other faculty in the department.”
There’s some discussion of these courses at Crooked Timber, but I thought I’d highlight the post here, and invite discussion of the courses from professors as well as current and former students. Does your department offer such a course, and if so, what is it like? Are such courses valuable, and if so, how? What should their aims be, and how might you realize them?
Note: As Charles Pigden reminds us in a comment below, this topic was the subject of a post here back in 2015.
Reposting a comment from a similar thread nine years ago (with the proviso that I am now in my late sixties and do know what proseminar is or is supposed to be).
Here’s a fact which some of you will find almost unbelievable but which suggests a big cultural divide in profession. Until I began to read this thread I literally did not know what a proseminar was. And this despite the fact that I am a well-published philosopher in his late fifties. (I gather from the contributions that it’s the seminar class you take in your first year of graduate school which is designed to ensure a general level lf philosophical literacy, and that it is therefore non-optional.) The reason is, of course, that, as is common in the UK and Australasia, having completed my (three-year) BA, I did a research-only PhD. with no taught component. Whatever general literacy I may have as a philosopher, over-and-above what I learned as an undergraduate, I either taught myself through general reading or acquired by picking other people’s brains. (There is a lot you can learn from casual conversation). This suggests something interesting about the OP’s query. It is not just that for a non-North American teacher the question might not arise. In so far as there is a corresponding question, it would be not even be addressed to the same audience. . It would not be ‘What texts should we set in our proseminars?’ It would be ‘What books or articles should we read (or make sure that we have read) outside our specific research areas in order to be reasonably well-rounded philosophers?’. The first question is from a teacher asking other teachers (and perhaps former learners) for advice on to run somebody else’s education. The second is from a learner asking other learners and ex-learners for advice on how to run their own. I’ve got suggestions to make and recollections I could post about the second question. As for the first, it is too alien to my experience for me to have an opinion.
Okay, that was me being perhaps a trifle unhelpful, Now I’m going to try to be helpful both to people like my younger self doing a the thesis only PhD whilst attempting to educate themselves and to people designing a pro seminar for the benefit of incoming graduate students.
Let’s assume the you (or your students) had (or have had) a good undergraduate education but that from the philosophical point of view it was a little patchy. You want be (or you want each of your students to be) a wide-ranging philosopher who can turn up to a great many papers (though probably not every paper), can understand roughly what is going on and can usually ask an intelligent question. You also want to be (or want your students to be) the sort of person who can slot in to small-to-medium department where breadth is at a premium. What should you read and/or recommend? .
Well if you are within the broadly analytic tradition, I strongly recommend Scott Soames two books: Philosophical Analysis the Twentieth Century vol 1 The Dawn of Analysis and vol.2, The Age of Meaning. (his two later books collectively titled The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, are also very good but a bit too advanced for either a proseminar course or the early stages of graduate self-education). These are really excellent books despite a certain tendency to what specialists in the area (such as myself ) might condemn as over-simplification and a rather cavalier disregard for historical detail. On a great many issues he strikes me as simply correct, and when he isn’t the clarity of his style enables you to see where he goes wrong. Supplement these two volumes with Potter’s The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930. In some ways this is even better. Potter is equally rigorous , a more careful historian and a more attractive writer, but he does not have
`Soames’s range or depth. Use these books as your guides/set texts dipping into the authors they discuss as your specific interests or the interests of you class dictate. There are important philosophers they neglect, Potter because of his temporal focus, and Soames for reasons that are not clear to me. Of these the most important, in my view, is Hilary Putnam. But this problem can be solved by helping yourself/directing your class to the first two volumes of Putnam’s Collected Papers Mathematics, Matter and Method, and Mind. Language and Reality. These collections contain what in view are some absolute classic must-read (and eminently readable) articles, and I am so grateful to my Cambridge supervisors for introducing me to them all those years ago.
I would recommend a similar strategy if you wanted to educate yourself or to teach a proseminar about continental philosophy. Pick some good guide – perhaps David West’s Continental Philosophy, an Introduction, though I stand to be corrected – and dip into selected texts.
What about a proseminar or a program of self-education on the earlier History of Philosophy? Here Peter Adamson provides the solution. He has enriched the world with his brilliant, readable, informative and funny (if sometimes rather corny) series A History of Philosophy Without any Gaps. There are too many volumes now to do for a single course (though this is no problem at all for the dedicated self-educator), but it might be possible to use two or three of them as set texts accompanied by judicious dipping into the primary works for a proseminar. If you don’t want to be too Eurocentric, I would recommend volume 1 Classical Philosophy, volume 3 Philosophy in the Islamic World, and volume 5 Classical Indian Philosophy coauthored with Jordan Ganieri. (I am personally hanging out for the forthcoming volume Classical Chinese Philosophy in the expectation that I will learn a lot and will have a lot of fun doing it.)
So, general strategy: Get yourself or prescribe to your students a good guide and then dip into the primary texts as your interests (or those of your students) suggest.
We have a 1st year course here, where we read and discuss a different paper every week, chosen by the course leaders (the module is usually co-taught), but on a preferably broad range of topics.
My sense is that the aim is to give grad students some common ground, and (since in the UK, there is much less chance of developing a “cohort” than in the US), some occasion for the students to meet and get to know one another. Not everyone has a philosophy background, so it is also helpful to acquaint them with some of that.