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articles
1. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Jonathan Bennett, Samuel Gorovitz Improving Academic Writing
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Academic writing, even in prestigious journals, is frequently ugly and arduous. The writing in academic philosophy is no exception, especially given philosophers’ tendency to overlook prose and to focus exclusively on philosophical content. This paper argues that good prose matters for moral, prudential, and philosophical reasons. After glossing these reasons, the authors offer advice, born of experience, to academic writers who want to achieve clear, effective prose. Their advice includes how to improve sentence structure (e.g. eliminate undue repetition and forms of “to be,” be careful with comma use, evaluate sentences by reading them aloud), global considerations (e.g. use technical notation cautiously, avoid prose in footnotes, read and report opponents’ views with charity), how to practice reiterating the same point in different words (e.g. play language games likes crossword puzzles, read non-academic prose, aim to communicate one’s point succinctly), and the suggestion to take prose seriously in the evaluation of student work.
2. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Richard A. Talaska Philosophical Reasoning in Ethics and the Use of the History of Philosophy
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Successful critical thinking in ethics does not proceed directly to an evaluation of ethical phenomena, but rather necessitates the evaluation of one’s own ethical paradigm for truth. This requires the making explicit of one’s own ethical paradigm, something best achieved through a process of comparing and contrasting it with alternative ethical paradigms. This paper presents a pedagogical strategy for making explicit a very basic set of assumptions: those of the Western, liberal, individualist tradition. The author argues that Glaucon’s position in Plato’s Republic is essentially that of the liberal individualist and that, following Glaucon’s speech in Book II, the work presents an alternative to this position. In this light, Plato’s text is a helpful and illuminating counterpoint to Western liberal values. Reading the Republic as a foil to canonical liberal individualist authors (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Madison) offers a unique opportunity to thematize some of our most fundamental moral assumptions and to help students gain the perspective necessary to perform the objective, critical work of ethics.
3. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Donald Wayne Viney Logic Crystallized
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This paper presents, explains, and addresses the pedagogical utility of the “Wachter crystal,” a three-dimensional representation of basic principles of logic designed and created by Thomas Wachter in 1992. The author first discusses a way of understanding relations of logical inference which groups propositions possessing identical truth tables into the same class (that is, a way of conceptualizing rules for replacement). Next, the author presents and explains a 16 x 16 matrix, the most basic figure for representing the inferential relations between the classes of propositional logic. Such a matrix easily maps reflexivity, asymmetry, and transitivity in relations of implication. Moreover, since the relations and properties it illustrates can also be illustrated by a lattice, one can construct a three-dimensional model to represent them. The Wachter crystal, which resembles chemists’ models of molecules, illustrates the same principles as the matrix while foregrounding the commonly-neglected difference between Philonian conditionals (which belong to the object language of propositional logic) and implication (which belong to the metalanguage). In addition to being a perspicuous and aesthetically engaging way to represent basic principles of propositional logic, the Wachter crystal is a bridge to more advanced logical concepts such as modal logic, sentence connectives, and predicates of sentences.
4. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Robert Figueroa, Sara Goering The Summer Philosophy Institute of Colorado: Building Bridges
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This paper presents an overview of the goals, structure, and results of an annual, week-long, summer philosophy institute for high school students. Inspired by other similar programs, the Summer Philosophy Institute of Colorado (SPI-CO) was designed for a culturally diverse group of students, aiming to expose college-track high school students to philosophy, to encourage students in lower-track classifications to pursue college, to offer advising to students on how to make college a reality, to expose both groups of students to critical thinking skills, and to promote cultural diversity in philosophy as a discipline. After explaining why philosophy encourages students in education and why high school students are so well-primed to study it, the authors give a detailed overview of the structure of the institute, including schedule, lesson plan, texts and themes studied, funding, and student demography. The authors conclude by discussing an outreach program that grew out of the SPI-CO and a summary of the initial results of the program.
5. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Ronald Paul Salzberger Ethics Outside the Limits of Philosophy: Ethical Inquiry at Metropolitan State University
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At a university where demand for an introductory ethics course is huge and spans many disciplines, it is challenging to achieve the appropriate degree of generality such that many students could take the course as their single exposure to ethics while others would find it sufficiently challenging and interesting to continue in philosophy. This paper discusses the considerations that led to a course focused on “expert ethical discourse.” Directed to a primarily non-traditional student body, this course aims for analytical skills that are highly relevant to students’ lives. Its goal is thus closer to “ethical literacy” than familiarity with the Western ethical canon (e.g. Aristotle, Kant, Mill). Taking seriously a number of feminist and post-modernist criticisms applicable to traditional ethics courses, “Ethical Inquiry” seeks to introduce students to dominant discourses on ethics (those which are highly influential on how people think and talk about ethics). Most of these discourses belong to disciplines other than philosophy, but the course uses philosophical tools for understanding and critiquing them, resembling a “moral critical theory” approach. After recounting faculty objections to this approach, the author reviews the course’s texts, how each discourse’s limits were approached, and the benefits and drawbacks of each text in the classroom.
reviews
6. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
David Boersema The Continental Philosophy Reader
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7. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Charles W. Harvey Existentialism: Basic Writings
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8. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Charles L. Creegan Either/Or, I (International Kierkegaard Commentary, 3)
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9. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Brian Domino Nietzsche's System
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10. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Eric Snider Statesman. Plato
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11. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Bruce B. Suttle How Are We to Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest
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12. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Gregory F. Weis Ethics from Experience
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13. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Anne M. Edwards Punishment and Rehabilitation
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14. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Glen T. Martin The Evidential Argument from Evil
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15. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Jeffrey W. Crawford African Philosophy: A Classical Approach
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16. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
John Alan Holmes Contemporary Epistemology
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new publications
17. Teaching Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 2
Books Received: 6 November 1996 - 20 February 1997
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