The so-called “problem of student relativism” among college students refers to the tendency of students to contend that ethics are simply relative to an individual’s personal views. This paper sees student relativism less as a problem and more as a developmental issue involving self-definition. As such, many philosophy teachers choose texts that are aim to engage students in reflecting upon this developmental issue. In addition to classic texts like Descartes’s “Meditations” and “The Apology of Socrates,” this paper suggests that two further works that address themes relevant to this issue are Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer.”

This paper describes a course on war and morality that involves a service-learning dimension. Motivated by the hypothetical imperative that if political philosophers have any special responsibility in a democratic society, then it is to acquaint citizens with political violence, the paper discusses the nature of political responsibility and political violence, the purpose of including a service requirement in a course on war and morality, and describes the content of just such a course. While reporting that service-learning students did not seem to leave the course with a clearer understanding of the relationship between war and other varieties of political violence, they appeared to acquire a clearer understanding of the effects of the violence of war, thereby preparing them to make the former connection in the future.

Rarely do Introduction to Philosophy textbooks connect, in any thoroughgoing way, the study of philosophy with examples from literature. While contemporary analytic thinkers often tie literary works to philosophical themes and some serious philosophers have written works of literature, these two ways of linking literature to philosophy face significant pedagogical disadvantages. Another tack is to choose a literary work written by a novelist that has implications for philosophical subjects. This paper describes just such a strategy, namely by supplementing traditional materials for an Introduction to Philosophy course with Daniel Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun.”

Students reading Aristotle for the first time often face significant challenges. To complicate matters, if students who already have the habit of reading at a superficial level are asked to read large portions of Aristotle’s work, instructors may be reinforcing bad reading habits. This paper suggest that it is possible to insure many students learn how to read Aristotle for themselves provided students are assigned small, relatively accessible portions of text and initial discussion of these texts is geared toward empowering students to make sense of Aristotle for themselves. To this end, this paper has developed an exercise using modeling clay that helps students to learn some of the main points in Book I and II of Aristotle’s “Physics.”