Cover of The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy
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1. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Giuseppe Boncori Teaching Philosophy as Education and Evaluation of Thinking
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Teaching philosophy and critical thinking is one of the main ways to clearly reaffirm the value of human persons and of goodness and freedom. It is not sufficient to propose a philosophical message, but we must teach it systematically (curriculum) with a real synergy between teachers and parents. We must also build a curriculum, which includes an evaluation model based on clear goals and objectives: the intermediate and final evaluation and assessment will enable us to be sure that we have reached our aim. It is also necessary to verify every step, evaluate it and compare it to the criteria (general project, goals, objectives) we put in our mind and use in our teaching. This critical evaluation needs methods and some teaching instruments described herein. The final philosophical education will be much stabler and assure us about our scientific and formative project.
2. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Anne-Marie Bowery The Use of Reading Questions As a Pedagogical Tool: Fostering an Interrogative, Narrative Approach to Philosophy
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In this paper I examine the text of the Symposium to illustrate two non-philosophical responses to Socrates' pedagogical provocation. While Apollodorus and Aristodemus, two Socratic disciples, demonstrate their erotic commitment to Socrates, they do not practice philosophy. They manifest their non-philosophical behavior in two ways. First, they idolize and imitate Socrates. Second, they constantly tell stories about Socrates. In the first section I analyze Aristodemus' and Apollodorus' emotional attachment to Socrates. While both disciples are genuinely protective of Socrates, their behavior often precludes the practice of philosophy. In the second section, I examine the nuances of the narrative frame of the Symposium. Apollodorus and Aristodemus both express their commitment to Socrates by telling stories about him. While their stories do preserve knowledge about Socrates, they are unpersuasive spokespersons for the philosophical life. They remain mired in their personal love for Socrates. In the third section, I interpret Plato's rhetorical use of anonymity as a strategy designed to mitigate against the dangers of discipleship.
3. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Elliot D. Cohen Teaching an Applied Critical Thinking Course: How Applied Can We Get?
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Encouraging students to apply classroom knowledge in their personal, everyday life is a major problem confronting many teachers of critical thinking. For example, while a student might recognize an ad hominem argument in a classroom exercise, it is quite another thing for him or her to avoid the same in interpersonal relations, say with parents, siblings, and peers. One approach to this problem is the creation of interaction software to which students can turn for input on the rationality of their own thinking. Students can then speak to computers rather than instructors about their private lives without having to share confidential information with any other human being, yet still receive relevant feedback. I discuss software technology that actually performs this function. The software in question is an interactive, artificial intelligence program that checks beliefs for faulty thinking ("fallacies"), including inductive and deductive errors. The system "scans" student essays for possible fallacies; asks questions at relevant junctions; provides individualized feedback on fallacies committed; provides summaries of fallacies found; diagnoses thinking problems; issues recommendations; and provides other pertinent information.
4. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Quentin Colgan Teaching the Confessions, Books 1-8: Theme and Pattern
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Augustine's passionate and immensely personal account of his conversion has enthralled readers for centuries. Unfortunately, the passion and personal nature of the writing can stand as a barrier to comprehension, especially when the text is taught at the undergraduate level. Add to this the fact that the work has the character of one long and substained prayer to God, contains many passages that are tediously introspective, and refers to a time and place that are foreign to today's undergraduates, the task of helping students to understand and appreciate the work is daunting, to say the least.
5. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Ernesto Gustavo Edwards, Alicia M. Nica Pintus Filosofía, Educación y Rock
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Our proposal suggests an alternative method of teaching philosophy systematically in a scholarly and academic way by drawing a meaningful connection between studies and real life. From a different perspective, our 'texts' will be those with which our students are most acquainted: rock music. We discuss the fundaments of meaningful learning, show how philosophy can be related to rock music, and apply this relation pedagogically. Taking the concept of freedom as an example, we use texts from traditional philosophical thinkers as well as lyrics from Argentinian rock musicians and songwriters in order to focus student reflections on the topic. The student establishes a dialog with rockers that allows them to begin philosophizing by interpreting, dissecting, analyizing, and discerning texts in both traditions. This project has emerged slowly from a prolonged educational experience and in-depth research and reflection. Our focus is on planning, developing, and evaluating an original educational program.
6. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
David W. Felder The World Consensus Game
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The World Consensus GameTM allows anyone to contribute to the creation of a world consensus on issues that divide people. Participants can look up positions that have been taken on contious topics and contribute to the discussion. Participation is easy. Once you identify a question that interests you, a map is provided that shows the positions previously taken along with definitions of these various positions. You can examine arguments in favor of a given position, including the argument judged best by philosophers and the argument most favored by the general public. You can also express your own position as well as contribute new positions, new arguments, and criticisms of other individual's arguments. The World Consensus GameTM is like a huge symposium of the world's people with you as a participant, and can be used in a classroom setting or by computer.
7. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Maura J. Geisser Can Deaf Children Be Taught to Think Philosophically?
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Researchers have found that development of what is called the "mature theory of mind" normally occurs between the ages of 3 and 5. Astington, de Villiers, Peterson, and Siegel point to age 4 as the critical age for syntactic development involving embedding sentences associated with the use of mental verbs, such as "think", "know", and "feel". These verbs are necessary for the representation of mental states such as knowledge, belief, and pretense. For example, "I thought the dragon was fierce" involves a mental verb ("think") and an embedded complement sentence ("the dragon was fierce"). Such complement structures make it possible to explicitly distinguish between things as they are in the world and things as they are represented in someone's mind (e.g., imagination, belief, pretense). Thus, command of compliment structures and mental verbs — in particular, the ability to differentiate the meanings of different mental verbs — is crucial to a child's ability to understand and differentiate between narrative and expository stories. This ability is also crucial to the child's understanding of such higher-order cognitive concepts as lying, error and mistake, and false belief. Unfortunately, for deaf children there is a delay of approximately 3 years in developing command of complement structures with mental verbs. Thus, what a hearing child develops at the age of 4 will likely occur in the deaf child only at the age of 7. I describe a philosophical thinking program to be implemented at the kindergarten level. I argue that such a program can help deaf children develop a better command of mental verbs and their associated syntactic structures.
8. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Garth Kemerling Teaching Philosophy on the Internet
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I defend the practical value of teaching undergraduate philosophy courses in the Internet. Three important objectives of philosophical education can be achieved as effectively by electronic means as in the classroom. First, information about the philosophical tradition can be conveyed by hypertext documents on the World-Wide Web. Second, philosophical dialogue can be conducted through participation in an electronic forum. Third, close supervision of student writing can be achieved by means of e-mail submission of written assignments. In each case, I argue that the electronic method offers significant advantages to student learning.
9. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Rudi Kotnik Exploring Subjectivity in Teaching Philosophy
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In the teaching of philosophy, we need to be connect with everyday life. Students in introductory courses can be more motivated when philosophical problems have personal significance. Take the topic of 'selfhood.' Introductory textbooks generally begin with the oracle at Delphi: "Know thyself!" But this motto is usually treated as the search for general knowledge of the individual or of human nature. Is it possible for a student to acquire some knowledge about him or herself during this course and reflect on it in a philosophically relevant way? Can personal experience help in understanding philosophical concepts such as this one? These are the questions which I address. Since I think that philosophers have yet to develop didactical tools for these purposes, I will present techniques derived from Gestalt therapy which can be useful for the teaching of philosophy. The aim is not change but experience itself, with awareness serving as the basis for philosophical analysis. The characteristics of this experience-based pedagogy are: (1) three dimensional inquiry: questioning basic concepts or assumptions and opening new questions, both based on personal experience; (2) experiential work involving a problem, a theory, and an example; and (3) mutual influence between theory and experience, i.e., an interrelationship between the personal and the 'educational' gestalt.
10. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Jonathan Lavery, Jeff Mitscherling Teaching Argument Evaluation in An Introductory Philosophy Course
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One of the greatest challenges in teaching an introductory philosophy course is convincing students that there are, indeed, reliable standards for the evaluation of arguments. Too often introductory students criticize an argument simply by contesting the truth of one of its claims. And far too often, the only claim in an argument that meets serious objections is its conclusion. For many students, the idea that an argument displays a structure which can be evaluated on its own terms is not very difficult to grasp. Unfortunately, the idea is grasped only in an abstract way, with insufficient appreciation of how structural problems manifest themselves in concrete arguments, and without the vocabulary for formulating structural criticisms. But this paper is not simply about teaching logic, it is about pedagogy. Our task is to instill in the student the habit of clear thinking. When we send our students out into the world, we have to ensure that they are prepared for it.
11. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Arthur O. Ledoux Teaching Meditation to Classes in Philosophy
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In alignment with the overall theme of the congress, "Philosophy Teaching Humanity," this paper proposes that teachers of philosophy consider instructing their students in simple techniques of meditation. By meditation I mean the practice of mindfulness which typically begins by paying clear, steady, non-reactive attention to the sensations of one's own breathing, and then extending this attention to embrace all bodily sensations, feelings, moods, thoughts, and intentions. I discuss how to integrate meditation practically in the philosophy classroom and then respond to three objections that have been raised to that practice. I then discuss the potential benefits of the practice, arguing first of all that meditation has academic benefits, especially in courses in Asian philosophy. But of much wider application is the wisdom of non-attachment which the mediation naturally evokes primarily through the experience of impermanence. The potential benefits of the paradigm are then briefly indicated as related to our experience of body, mind, society and nature. I conclude by commending the proposal as a small but important practical step philosophy teachers can take to help our fellow humans navigate the challenging transformation of our time.
12. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Ronnie Littlejohn, Mike Awalt Decentered Classrooms: The WWW and Problem Based Learning in Introductory Philosophy
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This presentation explains how problem-based learning and the World Wide Web (WWW) may be used in collaboration to shift student learning experiences in dramatic ways and to encounter the tasks and concerns of philosophy. We will provide a guided tour of the web site and the problems used in the course, and will describe how these pedagogical strategies may be used to complement traditional classroom venues without making a commitment to offering a course completely on-line for distance learning scenarios. Problem-based learning will also be described and its importance to philosophical instruction will be emphasized. We argue that teaching philosophy by means of problems is more philosophically sound than taking a discrete topical or textual approach. Challenges to this pedagogy are uncovered and discussed.
13. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Helena Lorenzová Bernard Bolzano-Pedagogue
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Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848), the famous logician and mathematician, worked from 1805-1819 as a religious professor at the Prague University. His studies focused on three main themes: (1) ethical education, including a rather liberal sexual education as well as the problems of the coexistence of Czechs and Germans in one country (with foresight into some of these matters before the rise of extreme nationalism); (2) social problems, where he formulated for the first time his social-utopian vision of human society based on the fundamental equality of people, ideas later gathered in his book, Von dem besten Staate; and (3) philosophy and religion, of which his lectures concentrate on the social function(s) of the Church and the social mission of the priesthood. Because of his opinions, he was disqualified from his professorship, resulting in a Church investigation against him. He was unable to return to the university, denied the right to publish in Austria, and relegated to live out his life as a private research worker. Bolzano's fate is similar to that of another pedagogue from Bohemia-Jan Patocka.
14. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
J. Aultman Moore Shame and Learning in Plato’s Apology
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15. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Bert Olivier Philosophy, Interdisciplinary Teaching and Student Experience
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This paper focuses on novel approaches open to teachers of philosophy in particular, but more generally also to other university teachers, in the face of what Allan Bloom saw as the waning of a literary culture. It is argued that, although some of Bloom's suggestions regarding the successful engagement of students' interest-against overwhelming odds-are didactically valuable, he neglects precisely those avenues from which students could benefit most on the basis of their own experience in a world largely devoid of literary attachments but saturated with audiovisual ones. These options are explored in some detail from various perspectives, including the difference between a written and an audiovisual text, the philosophical-critical potential of rock music and the interdisciplinary value of a teaching model that has student experience as its point of departure.
16. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
James F. Perry The Dream Hypothesis, Transitions, and the Very Idea of Humanity
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Why should we believe in such a thing as humanity? Should we accept appearances or take authority as our guide? Should we point to some pragmatic advantage to be gained by believing it, or is there proof? Philosophy offers such proof, contained in the dream hypothesis of the Buddha and Plato (and, more famously, Descartes). The dream hypothesis reveals our common ground. It refers to a familiar experience in terms of which young people of every time and place can understand why routine, authority, definition and first principle, category, criterion, perception and paradigm might fail. But the dream hypothesis is about the transition from sleeping to waking. As familiar, this transition is an excellent device for teaching that similar transitions can happen to one who is already awake. The dream hypothesis is about the soul, and the capacity to choose not only one's actions but also one's contexts. On the eve of the new millennium, we face responsibility for the results of our routines. The dream hypothesis promises to awaken a taste for foresight and negotiation. When we all understand the dream hypothesis, we will no longer worship our routines, but will be better judges of their utility. We will stand together when we transcend our cultures and recognize the capacity of all citizens of every nation, tribe, and culture to grow, that is, when we awaken to the possibility of waking up.
17. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Heather L. Reid The Educational Value of Plato’s Early Socratic Dialogues
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When contemplating the origins of philosophical paideia one is tempted to think of Socrates, perhaps because we feel that Socrates has been a philosophical educator to us all. But it is Plato and his literary genius that we have to thank as his dialogues preserve not just Socratic philosophy, but also the Socratic educational experience. Educators would do well to better understand Plato's pedagogical objectives in the Socratic dialogues so that we may appreciate and utilize them in our own educational endeavors, and so that we may adapt the Socratic experience to new interactive educational technologies. Plato designed his Socratic dialogues to arm students for real world challenges and temptations. First, in both form and function the dialogues attempt to replicate the Socratic experience for their audience. They demand from their readers what Socrates demanded from his students: active learning, self-examination, and an appreciation for the complexity and importance of wisdom. Second, the dialogues challenge the conflation of professional and personal excellence, best exemplified by sophists such as Hippias, and exhort their reader to pursue personal aretê separately from and alongside practical and professional skills or technai. Third, they aim not to transmit some prepackaged formula for success, but to teach students to learn for themselves; that is to love and pursue wisdom. The Socratic dialogues, and philosophic dialogue itself, are educationally important in that they teach us to be philosophers in the literal sense.
18. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
W. T. Schmid Socratic Paideia: How It Works and Why It So Often Fails
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I emphasize four points: (1) Socratic dialectic challenges the interlocutor not only to acquire the correct moral opinions, but to question and think for oneself and to develop one's own moral rationality; (2) it involves anticipatory acts of several types of virtue: courage, moderation, and justice and concern for the common good as opposed to competition and jealousy; (3) what is at stake is not only the topic of the particular exchange, but the opportunity for membership in a rational/educational community; and (4) the fact that Socrates' interlocutors typically reject the opportunity for moral insight and personal growth he makes available to them explains why he cannot be said to possess a techne of moral education, and why he insists that virtue cannot be taught. The process of education through the elenchus is not a matter of correct instruction, but of rational elicitation, which must be responded to by personal choice. Thus Socrates' principles may represent not only beliefs he has tested over many years of dialogue, but also values he has come to through participation in elenctic inquiry, the idealized extension of norms required by and created in the practice of dialectic. Socratic education involves the interlocutor in the confrontation with a self whose irrational attachments of appetite and ego are exposed and must be overcome for the interlocutor to experience catharsis.
19. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Jules Simon Levinas on the Border(s)
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This essay explores my own situation of teaching philosophy in a more or less traditional undergraduate setting but in a way that is especially relevant to the theme of this Congress, namely, the theme of "philosophy educating humanity." In my case, I teach philosophy but from a perspective that is non-traditional and which undercuts the standard questions originating from and orienting around a "philosophia perennia." Specifically, I teach philosophy of religion from the perspective of Jewish philosophy, and even more specifically, from the perspective of the French Jewish philosophy of Emmanuelle Levinas. Moreover, I teach philosophy in an educational environment that is representative of the greater global community because I teach at the University of Texas at El Paso, situated on the border that separates the United States and Latin America. Finally, my teaching situation is one that is further marginalized because of the precarious nature of my academic position, namely, trained outside the traditional borders of philosophical faculty and working at first as a part-timer and only recently as a full-time, non-tenure track teacher of philosophy and humanities. Hence, I offer my experience of doing work of successfully teaching philosophy "on the borders" in the hope that others gathered here will be challenged to think differently about their own way of educating others.
20. The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy: Volume > 43
Edward Slowik Music, Science, and Analogies: Teaching the Philosophy of Science with Non-Scientific Examples
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This essay explores the benefits of utilizing non-scientific examples and analogies in teaching philosophy of science courses, or general introductory courses. These examples can help resolve two basic difficulties faced by most instructors, especially when teaching lower-level courses: first, they can prompt students to take an active interest in the class material, since the examples will involve aspects of the culture well-known to the students; second, these familiar, less-threatening examples will lessen the students' collective anxieties and open them up to learning the material more easily. To demonstrate this strategy of constructing and employing non-scientific examples, a lengthy analogy between musical styles and Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is developed.