New: The Philosophy Teaching Library (guest post)
A pair of philosophers have built upon the approach to pedagogical materials of a highly successful philosophy course at the University of Notre Dame to create a vetted, open educational resource that can help guide students anywhere through primary philosophical texts.
The Philosophy Teaching Library was founded by Wes Siscoe (Bowling Green) and Paul Blaschko (Notre Dame).
In the following guest post, they introduce The Philosophy Teaching Library, discuss its features, and explain how others can contribute to its growth.
[Disclosure: I am a member of the project’s advisory board.]
Introducing the Philosophy Teaching Library
by Wes Siscoe and Paul Blaschko
Have you ever assigned a primary text to students only for them to get nothing out of it? Do they get lost, or not have the background necessary to understand what they’ve read? Is it impossible for them to productively interact with primary texts outside of class?
Maybe for these reasons, you have decided to avoid primary texts in your classroom in favor of articles that attempt to summarize these important philosophical works. If this is the route you have chosen, do you worry that you aren’t helping students develop the skills to engage with philosophers on their own terms? Are you concerned that you are just training them to read philosophy as a collection of “Cliffs Notes”?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, The Philosophy Teaching Library is here to help.
The Philosophy Teaching Library is a collection of introductory primary texts.
What is an “introductory primary text”, you might ask? Instead of leaving philosophical texts as impenetrable and incomprehensible, introductory primary texts facilitate student understanding via textual commentary, illustrative examples, and detailed argument breakdowns. Each piece allows students to develop their philosophical understanding along with their ability to read the primary texts themselves.
The Philosophy Teaching Library builds on the work of the God and the Good Life class at the University of Notre Dame. Because of the challenges we just discussed, the God and the Good Life course introduced students to a number of seminal philosophy pieces using textual commentaries. Originally, these commentaries were intended just for Notre Dame students, but because the God and the Good Life has a public-facing website, other instructors started using these commentaries as well. This collection of pieces currently receives over 25,000 visitors per month during the academic year, from students at institutions across the world. Unfortunately, because these articles have been hosted on Notre Dame’s God and the Good Life course website, it is not a straightforward task to locate and make use of them. But because of their popularity with instructors, we are now building the Teaching Library, a single digital platform that is easily searchable by instructors, students, and the general public.
The Philosophy Teaching Library is an open educational resource. It’s free to use, and instructors can simply provide their students with a link to their selected reading. This will make important philosophical texts easily accessible to students, helping the uninitiated break into the philosophical conversation. We do not intend The Philosophy Teaching Library to be a final destination in a student’s philosophical journey, but instead a helpful guide along the way. That is why each of our pieces includes links to the full primary text.
So far, we have entries on all of the following and more:
- The Nicomachean Ethics, Book I and Book II
- W.K. Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief
- Aquinas on Faith and Reason and the Five Ways
- Descartes’ Meditation I and Meditation II
- Plato’s Apology and the Allegory of the Cave
The Philosophy Teaching Library is peer-reviewed. We accept submissions from instructors and graduate students in philosophy and related fields, and all those interested in contributing should email us their proposal at [email protected], detailing which primary text they would like to cover and why that text is a good fit for the Library. If the text is available (i.e., we do not have any other similar pieces in progress), then we will invite the author to submit a piece of that text. The submission will then undergo a process that includes an editorial review process (to make sure that each piece meets our unique formatting requirements) and a peer review process (to ensure that they are up to scholarly standards). For more about our submissions process, see our website here.
Because of our peer-review process, we anticipate that we will be able to quickly grow our collection of introductory primary texts, adding many of the readings that instructors want to use in their introductory philosophy courses. Philosophy is not just for the ivory tower, but for thinking about how to lead good lives. Thank you for all the work you are doing to help students begin their philosophical journeys, and we hope the Library will serve as a helpful resource in that task!
To keep up with newly published pieces through our twice yearly newsletter, go ahead and subscribe at our website here. Or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and Bluesky.
Imagine (for example) a visual arts student. They want to make a living drawing stuff, but they are seeing that possibility evaporate because projects like this use AI instead of hiring artists. If I direct them to this website, is it going to give them the extra support they need to struggle through Aristotle, or is it going to make them think philosophers have no problem using AI to cut corners when it comes to stuff we don’t care about (incidental art on a website) such that my student concludes there is no problem with them using AI to cut corners when it comes to stuff they don’t care about (Aristotle)?
That is, I don’t know how much luck I am going to have convincing my students they should spend extra time trying to understand a primary text instead of just asking ChatGPT to summarize it for them by sending them to a website that uses AI to draw pictures instead of paying artists to draw them.
Your comment seems to assume that the options are using AI art or paying a human artist. But in many situations like this, the options are rather using AI art or using no art or using publicly licensed art.
I applaud the initiative, but I have to say that I find the reliance AI produced artwork very off-putting, and I agree with Daniel Weltman’s early comment that it sends a terrible message to students and casual users that philosophers as a profession do not care about human creativity and human employment and well-being. Also, is there anything here that is of greater value than the combination of Bennett’s Early Modern Texts, the SEP, and the IEP?
Bennett’s Early Modern Texts is very useful, particularly in providing colloquial “translations” even of texts in English. But I don’t think it has this sort of commentary. And SEP and IEP definitely are not written in ways that are helpful for introductory students.
We certainly need resources to help undergraduates learn how to read primary texts written in premodern or early modern times that have been translated into (e.g.) English from different languages and which are in unfamiliar genres for most students. Having an open-access collection of resources is an excellent idea, and I hope the range of materials can expand beyond the broadly Western tradition.
However, what I keep looking for as an instructor is not a summation or commentary, in whatever format, but a way to teach students how to read philosophy. In other words, I would appreciate an excerpt from an ancient Greek philosophical text that is followed by an explanation of how to reconstruct arguments from a dialogue form, a discussion of what philosophers tend to leave implicit and why, notes about intertextual connections and how students might recognize them, and so on.
This is important because I want my students to be able to then pick up a different text in the same genre or by the same author and have the skills to read it without an attached summary. My worry about this and similar existing endeavors is that students will skip the block quotes in favor of the summaries and boxes that interpret for them. Why not put the skills and tools in the boxes, so they are forced to engage with the text? When a summary is available in easier language, students will gravitate there.
(For what it’s worth, I am working with an academic publisher now on developing a series with a skills-based approach for Asian philosophical texts. The project has been ongoing for a long time, unfortunately, because it requires experts in a range of textual traditions. If anyone with significant expertise in Asian philosophies is interested in what I’ve just described and would like to be part of an editorial board for a series, please email.)
In my Introduction to Philosophy classes I do an exercise about how to read philosophy. I also sometimes do it as a campus-wide workshop for any students who care to attend. It is an interactive thing, so it is not easy to replicate with an online resource, but I did record a video containing a facsimile of much of the relevant content, which you may find useful as a resource (although it is at a higher level of abstraction than e.g. discussion of how to reconstruct an argument from a dialogue or what philosophers often leave implicit and why): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNTS_K1PJkw
Thanks for sharing this, Daniel. As an exercise in how to read analytic philosophy, it’s helpful.
Of course, philosophy is not only done in the genre of modern analytic philosophy papers. That’s where students (and instructors) can benefit from guidance by those who know the source languages and texts. On Bluesky, I was pointed to Burnyeat’s revised translation of the Theatetus for Hackett. Check out page 9 of his introduction for how he guides the reader in interpreting the dialogue, using both an example passage and some general explanation of how theses in dialogues are not found in a single place.
I’m thinking of these kinds of instructions as helping students learn how to read, not merely getting them to understand someone else’s interpretation.
Perhaps there’s something here related to the site’s use of AI. The experience of making art is valuable. Art isn’t just a visual output. I don’t want my students to just get an output from a philosophy text. I want them to experience reading and thinking in a sustained, disciplined manner.
I tried doing something like this in my classes, and you can find some versions of those reading guides on my website. The guides themselves are (depending on the text) paragraph-by-paragraph or section-by-section questions designed to guide close reading, but they don’t include the kind of sample results that you suggest here (that work was done mostly in class or in homework assignments). https://derekbowman.com/teaching/philosophy-reading-guides/
Thanks! That’s a nice selection of resources.
I have had a lot of success in teaching my students how to read philosophy using David Concepción’s “How to Read Philosophy” handout which is an appendix to his paper in Teaching Philosophy here: https://www.dawsoncollege.qc.ca/writing/wp-content/uploads/sites/196/Concepcion-Reading-Philosopy.pdf. I start out every single one of my (non-logic) courses with an entire lecture devoted to this, including an in-class exercise where we go through the steps together, and it works very well in my experience.
Yes, I use his approach, too! I went to an AAPT in graduate school in which he presented his work, and I found it very helpful.
I’m really not sure I see how this accomplishes the goal it sets out to do, or amounts to anything more than Cliffs Notes, despite their note otherwise. It’s true that students do struggle with primary texts nowadays more than ever, but the way forward is to teach them how to read, and even better how to read philosophy, than to simply boil those readings down to a couple paragraphs and do all the work for them in the surrounding text.To see this, ask yourself: how much would the students lose in comprehension if you cut out the actual primary text quoted? The answer: very little, because you’ve summarized it for them already (as opposed to say, just providing context).
I will also echo the earlier worries that the AI art helps undermine the usefulness of the website, and further makes it look cheap and amateur. The idea that these images are “property” of the project is also laughable; you didn’t create the image, and the process which created it was built on stolen art, so trying to exercise ownership over it is absurd.