Teachable and State of the Art
A philosophy professor has a question about teaching that I think will resonate with many readers.
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[“Portrait of Him” (detail) by Kat Kristof]
They write:
I would like to be able to teach my students the views, or the versions of views, most likely to have a shot at being correct. Often, these are relatively contemporary formulations, developed in light of the various problems with previous versions of the views. Yet I have found it difficult to find presentations of them that are written in a language or style comprehensible to non-experts, and that do not presume familiarity with the history of the inquiry. I’m curious about why this is the situation we’re in, but more importantly, I am curious about what other instructors with pedagogical aims similar to mine do. Are there texts, teaching resources, tools, or strategies they would recommend?
Your suggestions are encouraged.
In the background of this question is another one about the aims of lower- and mid-level philosophy courses, and perhaps an implicit criticism of common teaching practices in philosophy, which readers are also welcome to take up.
This is precisely the problem that we sought to address (for one specific view) with utilitarianism.net. So I hope that resource will be of some help, at least, to people teaching ethical theory. I’d love to see similarly comprehensive-yet-accessible offerings developed for the other major moral views/traditions!
I’m not sure I understand the question. Is the professor saying that contemporary intro texts do not do a good job?
I take it that contemporary intro texts focus on historical and oversimplified versions of views rather than sophisticated contemporary versions. To keep with the utilitarianism example Richard Chappell used, the most frequent way the view is presented is “the right thing to do is what produces the most happiness.” That’s obviously a gross oversimplification, but it has the virtue of being really easy to get across to undergraduates. So, the question asks, how to take sophisticated contemporary views with all their caveats and nuance and present them in the same “easy to get across to undergraduates” way?
Yeah, that’s what I thought it might mean. But to me the answer seems obvious: you can’t. The reason is that these views just are subtle and nuanced, because that’s what a correct solution requires. If one wants students to understand those views, one has to present them with the subtlety and nuance. I’m not sure there’s a way around that, any more than there would be in any field (philosophical or otherwise).
I agree. To me, the point of those texts is to help introduce a student to an ethical theory- give them the tools and background knowledge for them to explore its deeper implications and applications. Part of the message should be ‘you must think hard and long about this if you want to learn it’.
1000 Word Philosophy has a decent number of articles covering state of the art stuff, and it will only have more as time goes on.
Something to think is whether this concern is unique to philosophy pedagogy. I am not sure! Consider two very different disciplines: physics and english literature. Many physics undergraduate course (even upper-level) do not teach students the correct (with apologies to scientific non-convergentists) version of a view/theory. An introductory (or even mid-level) course in mechanics does not start and will often not teach quantum physics (and for very good reasons)! And a similar story is true for literature courses: jumping straight into Ezra Pound and the Imagists will be unhelpful. To make students understand and appreciate why Pound was so influential they need to be familiar with the “history of the inquiry”. Whether this situation is something to overcome or embrace, I do not know! But I prefer the advice from Calvin and Hobbes that sometimes “we’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are”
From Dennett’s “Philosophy According to Nozick”:
There was once a chap who wanted to know the meaning of life, so he walked a thousand miles and climbed to the high mountaintop where the wise guru lived. “Will you tell me the meaning of life?” he asked.
“Certainly,” replied the guru, “but if you want to understand my answer, you must first master recursive function theory and mathematical logic.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really.”
“Well, then… skip it.”
“Suit yourself.”
That is the sad story of the encounter between twentieth-century analytic philosophy and the public.
Correct me, but I’m pretty sure the guru is bluffing.
I thought so too, but then I remembered Nozick’s late work.
I think not exactly, but I find that piece somewhat tricky to interpret.
Imagine if there was an “Early Modern Texts” for recent philosophy, where major articles were presented in a form accessible to introductory students — with main points numbered, technical terms defined, slight digressions omitted, and similar edits (possibly made by the original author themselves). The venue would need copyright permission, or journals could do it themselves for a few articles a year.
SAVE US ALL. I teach students at every level, and one can (slowly) teach bits of actual history of philosophy, without Bennett-ing them down. [I suggest similar strategy for contemporary texts– teach less, more slowly]
Second this anti-Bennett approach, for a different reason. We should encourage students to speak *their* language, dialect, and idiolect without misleading them into thinking that everyone everywhere has spoken the same. It saves them from precisely the most important insights.
Possibly foolish proposal: why not take the published article, which is too hard for undergraduates to grasp, plug it into an LLM and have the LLM rewrite it to make it more comprehensible? It would take some back-and-forth editing, but maybe not that much.
The Diversity Reading List (https://diversityreadinglist.org) recommends papers in a wide range of philosophical topics that are appropriate for teaching. Each entry also includes some commentary on appropriate level and difficulty.
I think you should not use introductory texts that summarize philosophical theories. Use the primary texts. Allow them to struggle, but try to teach them how to read these texts. A big part of doing philosophy is learning how to accept, in the Socratic meaning, that one knows they do not know; it is learning to be okay with ambiguity and complexity. That doesn’t mean students will learn all these theories. But they will learn how to think more critically. As educators, our goal is not to get them to regurgitate philosophical views, but to learn to think critically. Intro texts don’t do this.
One could do both. Start the semester with a general, textbook introduction to the basics of, say, utilitarianism [it’s a consequentialist theory, that cares about happiness/pleasure, and maximization].
Then, they could get into the details by reading Bentham vs. Mill on pleasure, for example.
Primary texts are often easy to find free. Plenty of great free/open source textbooks/encyclopedias and damn this coke ad just popped up and is literally blocking the comment text box. Wtf
I have for a couple of years now provided a guest lecture in a colleague’s course, where my session is the only one to cover ethical theory. It is not a philosophy course, and the students typically have not taken any philosophy or ethics of any sort beforehand. The approach I landed on has worked pretty well, I think, both to introduce students to some basic families of ethical theories and also to help them appreciate the nuances. It involves no reading before the session, but I do provide them with reading recommendations that they can follow up with.
Here is the basic session plan. I begin with a lecturette introducing three views: virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology. I borrow, with only slight modification, Hursthouse’s way of laying these different views out in “Virtue Theory and Abortion.” We all talk through the views a bit, laying the basics out on a whiteboard, and then we take a short break.
After the break, we play a game. I created a set of three case studies that play off of each other in the sense that each has an apparently obvious solution that appeals to a theory that does not apply to the apparently obvious solution for any of the others. I split the class into three groups and have them each complete one case at a time, then turn it in for the next case (they get through all three in a different order). And for each case, they have to (a) choose whether the protagonist did the right thing, (b) justify their answer, and (c) it has to be unanimous. The first group to finish all three cases wins a prize (typically candy).
After the game, we have an open discussion. They quickly realize that their answers to the cases appealed to different theories, and this makes them uncomfortable. They appealed to one theory for one case, another for the next, and a third for the final one; but they didn’t land on any one theory for all cases. The discussion is then quite rich, typically focusing on how to reconcile all of this. One thing I like most about the exercise is that it introduces all sorts of nuance to the basic statements of the theories that we began with, but–crucially–it was the students themselves who introduced the nuances. And I can say things like: “Wow! Great point. If you’d like to think about this more, perhaps you’d be interested in reading X.” They can then either find X on the list of resources I provided or–in the best cases–email me for X because they thought of a nuance I hadn’t anticipated that they would.
BJPS Short Reads might work in some cases.
https://dailynous.com/2021/06/11/bjps-launches-short-reads/
I think that I reject this as a goal, at least in the courses I teach: “I would like to be able to teach my students the views, or the versions of views, most likely to have a shot at being correct.”
For the introductory courses I teach (Intro Phil and Intro Ethics). I don’t see why this should be the goal.
I am less interested in presenting potentially true theories to them than I am in presenting interesting theories to discuss – theories that at least grasp onto something that matters for the truth (like ‘consequences matter for morality,” “autonomy and consent matter,” “we should ask questions about where the universe came from,” etc.).
My goal is not for them to actually find a theory that they think is likely to be true. My goal is to have them become more rational people by discussing these arguments – and to enjoy doing so. Getting into the more nuanced modern versions of theories is often less interesting and almost always less enjoyable for intro students.
(Now, for upper-division courses, my goals are different and more truth-focused.)
I love it when philosophers write accessible essays about their own work that can make it approachable for both the public and for beginner undergraduates. I wish this were a more common practice. One of my favorite examples of this is Alex Worsnip’s essay on incoherence at Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-possible-to-hold-truly-contradictory-beliefs-together
No matter what our opinions towards the Hegelian idea that philosophy is the history of philosophy are, it is widely agreed that every philosophy has its own historicity, which means to understand its position in the history of philosophy benefits the comprehension of a certain philosophical views. Before training students as philosophers, I think teaching them the history of philosophy can be useful. As students travel from ancient Greek to modernity, many ideas becomes comprehensible gradually.
I’m not sure why contemporary formulations are more likely to be correct.
Indeed, that seems to rest on the highly dubious assumption that philosophers are less likely to be blinded by questionable presuppositions, motivated reasoning, etc, just because they live at some arbitrary time that happens to be now.
I think that it rests on the assumption that hundreds to thousands of years of rational critique and the wisdom of the crowd has refined these theories, shaving away the more implausible parts and offering more robust explanations and defenses of them
This is a plausible assumption to me.
As if to prove my point, that’s a nice bit of circular reasoning right there. You’ve basically said it’s plausible that lots of input of reason and wisdom, with presumably no countervailing unreason and unwisdom, will have made theories more reasonable and wise. Well sure. But the question is why we should characterise the input in that way.
I’m unsure why that would make it circular reasoning (rather than reasoning with a premise you want to deny). After all, this process is pretty plainly what has happened in mathematics.
If carefully reading and thinking through the history of philosophy doesn’t raise the probability that our theories are more accurate, then why are we bothering reading the history of philosophy at all?
I don’t mean to suggest that careful reflection over many years *won’t* yield good results. But while those good results can be seen here and there, I would dispute that we see them generally in contemporary philosophy. A lot of “contemporary formulations” of views badly misunderstand genuine insights precisely because of what the poster above called the “wisdom of the crowd.” These then take on a life of their own, as though they accurately or even more accurately represent the original views. Take “Kantian ethics”, whatever that means now.
Large amounts of ancient and premodern philosophy is what we’d now call mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, etc, etc. I think progress in those areas of (what was then) philosophy is rather more than “here and there” might suggest.
Sure, but I’m talking about what was and still is ‘philosophy’ in the most primary sense. The point is simply that it’s problematic to assume that just because a lot of smart people worked on ideas for a long time, we will therefore have better formulations in the end than what we started with. There’s quite a lot that can make all that work produce bad results, regardless of how clever those doing the work are.
It might also be important for us to reflect on the fact that lots of contemporary formulations of views come from direct engagement with more recent traditions (often at least partially determined by mere sociological factors within our profession) rather than primary sources. It sounds to me like this would make it less likely that the most recent formulations of views are “more accurate” (than what?? the views that many no longer pay any attention to except through the filter of many other generations?).
I think the idea of “philosophy in the most primary sense” is anachronistic; it refers to those philosophical problems that, so far, have not seen enough progress to be deemed science. I’ll defer to the more historically informed, but I don’t think it’s a distinction that Aristotle (or Newton) would have recognized.
Well, we sometimes see things better than Aristotle and Newton did. And from our vantage, rather than having only a negative definition as “not yet a special science”, philosophy appears as a two-and-a-half-thousand-year conversation about, inter alia, the beautiful, the true, and the good — along with a more-or-less inchoate attempt, worked out explicitly at least since the 1860s, to understand how the having of that conversation could be continuous with our being the sensory-reflective-motor animals we are. That’s the kind of inquiry the special sciences cannot cleave off, save that they find themselves doing philosophy.
And framed in the right way, this sort of view on what philosophy is shares a lot in common with the broadly Kantian-cum-Peircean idea that we’re gradually working our way toward a better understanding of what we can know, what we ought do, and what we may hope. So all the more important that we read and teach the history of philosophy, it seems to me. Even if we sometimes see things better than they did, very often they see things better than we realize.
Well, now I start to sympathize with the ‘you think the present moment is so special?’ critique. Several cleavings off – linguistics, psychology, computer science; economics, perhaps – occurred in the last century or so. Some are still ongoing. Are we so sure that this present moment is the one at which we finally understand what ‘real philosophy’ is?
(Also, quite large parts of what gets done in philosophy departments – including pretty much everything I’ve written myself – would count as ‘not philosophy’ on this definition.)
It’s a generic characterization, not a definition. And it’s a big tent, so plenty of what linguists, computer scientists, etc. do count as philosophy on this characterization. Think of the way Montague grammar colonized linguistics departments and philosophy of language programs after coming together at UCLA in the 1960s, or the way representational theories of cognition have broadened into two-factor theories and enactivism in the cognitive sciences in the last three decades.
One reason to read the history of philosophy is precisely to lower the probability that “our” philosophical theories (today) are more accurate. (And via a rather simple argument from induction.)
When teaching intro ethics, I like to walk students through this demonstration in lecture. It works nicely to both introduce game theory and explain the difference between pure altruism and more strategic forms of cooperation. Can be paired with a short reading from Hobbes. https://ncase.me/trust/
This is great, Mark, thanks!
(I think I’ll use it in a decision theory/game theory/social choice theory class in the Spring.)
My rather pessimistic view is in agreement with some others in the comments, in that what the OP asks can’t be done, except with the most gifted of students.
An old professor of mine used to regularly say, “Philosophy is hard”, which is true. So, we must lie to students, leaving out all the appropriate bells, whistles, and caveats that might make the claims truer, but would send us down rabbit holes from which most students would never return.
As a result, I teach a skeleton of the issues, with an added hint that there is a fuller account out there, for those interested.
It’s not just philosophy. I had a friend in grad school from the math department who would say, when it was time to go teach her section of intro calculus, “time to go lie to children”. I don’t know if the lie here was that limits and derivatives just are done with infinitesimals (rather than epsilons and deltas) or that limits and derivatives are only done with epsilons and deltas (such that infinitesimals are meaningless) or something else. But for many subjects, there are standardized curricula with standardized sequences of over-simplifications followed by introduction of some complexity while other is withheld until even later, because we’ve discovered that this is the way that helps the most students actually learn the material, in a useful way, including some of them getting the most sophisticated modern understanding, while the others get some understanding that is still useful.