How can philosophers incorporate the Digital Humanities into their classrooms? And why should they? In this paper, I explore answers to these questions as I detail what I have dubbed “The Monuments Project'' and describe how this project engages with Digital Humanities and teaches students to connect theoretical philosophical concepts with their lives. Briefly, the Monuments Project asks students to apply concepts discussed in our philosophy class (in my case, a Global Aesthetics class) with a monument in their environment. Instead of a traditional paper, students upload MP3s of their observations, pictures and/or drawings of the monument, and text-based responses. The goal of the Monument Project is twofold: to get students to connect what they have learned to a sense of place - the place where they live, and to introduce them to the Digital Humanities.

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is a debate-style activity that aims to help students cultivate skills of moral deliberation. While a fair amount has been written about the pedagogical benefits of Ethics Bowl, relatively little attention has been given to potential ethical criticisms of the activity. In this paper I present some reflections on an ethical challenge to Ethics Bowl, namely that applying the characteristic approach of Ethics Bowl to some issues of contemporary ethical controversy can be immoral. The concern is that treating certain topics as “open to debate” conveys disrespect for certain individuals, and risks normalizing harmful viewpoints. I argue that we should take this challenge seriously; indeed, the guiding values behind Ethics Bowl require that we do so. I conclude that conducting Ethical Bowl in an ethical manner requires caution and skill.

The truth table method, natural deduction, and the truth tree method, the three validity proving methods standardly taught in an introductory logic course, are too clumsy for the battlefield of real-life. The “short truth table” test is handy at times, but it stumbles at many other times. In this paper, we set up a general method that can beat all the methods mentioned above in a contest of speed. Furthermore, the procedure can be step-by-step paraphrased in a natural language, so that, unlike the other methods, a real-life logical problem can be analyzed and explained in a real-life language too.

This essay is basically divided into two parts. The first deals with the similarities between reductio ad absurdum arguments and slippery slope arguments. The chief example comes from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which advances an argument for the necessity of government for humane living. The second addresses some pedagogical concerns centered around another pair of arguments: the argument by complete enumeration and the argument by inductive generalization. The illustration for this pair comes from the arts. I finish with a suggestion that pairs like the above can be as effectively used in shorter, non-regular critical reasoning or introductory logic courses as those in mid-term or summer courses. Such pairing can demonstrate a good use of mixing and matching deductive and non-deductive arguments in teaching logic.

The article features an analytic protocol for examining controversial criminal cases in critical thinking courses. The rubric has been designed to be useful to busy critical thinking teachers who wish to draw on student interest in true crime. Six guidelines are presented that are intended to provide the instructor with a convenient scheme for quickly and easily framing classroom discussions. Due to their generality, the guidelines can be readily applied to a wide-range of cases, giving educators a high degree of flexibility in the selection of criminal affairs.

In this essay I advocate for the pedagogical value of public philosophy. In public essays, philosophers craft short arguments in clear prose that avoids disciplinary specific technical terms. Such texts are pedagogically valuable both because they teach students philosophical ideas and also because they offer students a template for philosophical argumentation upon which to model their own writing. Here I report on some of the pedagogical practices I have used for teaching public texts to advanced and introductory level undergraduates in order to demonstrate how public philosophy serves as a valuable resource for the teaching of philosophy that can help students develop their capacity for engaged philosophical thinking and the effective communication of philosophical ideas.

According to the World Bank, South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. It follows that teaching philosophy takes on a unique character in this country. During the initial COVID-19 outbreak, all universities were compelled to move online, entailing that the teaching of philosophy also moved online. However, because of their socio-economic realities, students faced many barriers, and this served to further marginalise already marginalised students. The university campus provides structural support to many of these students that they do not have at home—computer labs, internet access, and residences. With campuses shutting down and learning to move online, many (if not most) of our students faced significant challenges. This paper explores the challenges encountered during this time through empirical research. Five interviews were conducted with philosophy lecturers, and the data was analysed using Atlas.ti. This article therefore provides empirical insight into the challenges faced by philosophy lecturers as they taught philosophy during a pandemic in the “most unequal society in the world.”

Teaching through discussion is perhaps the most fundamental pedagogical technique of philosophy. When done well, discussion can promote long-term, durable learning. It supports an active-learning classroom, sparks higher-order cognition, and helps students construct their own understanding of the material. Yet it is often not done well: it is easily dominated by a few students; it can waste time on tangents and minutiae; it can fail to motivate students to prepare adequately; and it is not easily scalable. In this paper we present a technique, the random discussion leader (RDL), which addresses all of these shortcomings of traditional discussion. Qualitative and quantitative evidence from our quasi-experimental study (n = 279) suggests that RDL leads to better preparation, better engagement with the material, more equitable participation, and higher quality discussions. Additionally, we provide a toolkit for instructors interested in trying RDL, showing how the technique can be adapted to various course settings and materials.

Reflective journals are characterized by their expressive freedom and their intent that students explicitly connect course material to their own life experiences, emotions, beliefs, and feelings. Drawing on research on the use of reflective journals and on the reflections of students in my philosophy courses, I demonstrate how philosophy professors can use reflective journals as a tool to help their students achieve important learning outcomes. By making philosophy personal for students, reflective journals allow students to practice philosophy as a way of life, achieve important metacognitive outcomes, and (drawing on constructivism in learning theory) increase their knowledge and understanding of course content.

Highlighting a progression of exercises, this paper develops a pedagogical model aimed at giving students tools to deliberate about justice from within the Original Position and to debate the broader goals and limitations of justice as fairness. The approach focuses on the idea of a “distribution” of primary goods without relying on caricatures or being intimidated by the more technical features of the presentation. The series of exercises shows students how to move from more intuitive to less intuitive deliberative situations—a move that depends on seeing a just distribution as a product of a pure procedure. In particular, the exercises show the importance of distinguishing carefully between a distribution and an allocation of goods. Finally, it suggests ways in which we may use the theory to engage with our own distributive practices in democratic societies by focusing on the moral significance of persons as equals.

This paper will argue for the teaching of component skills in philosophy. We can distinguish between complex and component skills. Component skills bear a kind of constitutive relation to complex skills. We observe this distinction at use in standard pedagogies related to activities like sports, music performance, and mathematics. The central thesis is that devoting pedagogical resources to the development of component skills, especially at introductory levels, promotes better learning outcomes with respect to complex philosophical skills. Aside from defending this thesis, I will also provide a number of examples of activities that can be used to develop component skills.

The effectiveness of placed-based education in inspiring care for natural and local environments, improving academic performance, dispelling with artificial dichotomies, and grounding philosophic discourse is supported by research whose results have been published not only concerning elementary and alternative settings, but collegiate ones as well. However, very little if any reporting has been done on its effectiveness in formal logic. Given the foundational nature of logic and its tendency to fulfill general education requirements, this is unfortunate. Though I am persuaded it takes more than pedagogical magic wands to inspire self-driven student success, reflections on and examples of the actual constructions of a collegiate level introductory logic course that uses place- based curricula that also boasts some general statistical reassurance seems worth sharing. And, much to my own enjoyment, “sharing” provides me with an opportunity to describe a well-received extra credit opportunity involving a nationally recognized on campus tree tour.

Teaching philosophy online in secondary schools differs from offline teaching. The explanations usually offered for this difference show the cognitivist assumptions of mainstream pre-university philosophy education, meaning that philosophy education assumes that the aim of its practice is the enhancement of internal mental abilities. This paper argues that this view of the goal of education is unwarranted and unnecessarily restrictive, and that it implies an undesirable dichotomy between learning to be competent and being competent. An alternative, based on ecological and enactive views of cognition, is presented as a better conception of philosophical cognitive competence in general, and of the difference between offline and online teaching in particular. This alternative suggests that the difference resembles the difference between life in a zoo and life in the jungle, and that we should teach pupils to do wild philosophy.

Philosophy of Science can be transformed from a course suitable only for philosophy majors into Phil of Sci as Gen Ed, an approachable, engaging, and high-value part of a General Education program for all undergraduates, one that provides concepts and skills for students to use regularly in their everyday lives. The course bestows three major gifts upon students: (i) the motivation to work at becoming a more rational thinker, along with some elementary conceptual tools to help make this a reality; (ii) a suitably rich notion of ‘scientific method’ along with guidance and practice in metacognitively applying this to their own everyday thinking; and (iii) awareness of some of the many challenges of doing good scientific research and some of the questionable methodological practices and institutional forces that further complicate the enterprise, which prepares students from all fields to be more careful and discerning in their reception of scientific communications.

The authors of this essay challenge the notion that “philosophy” is irredeemably Eurocentric by providing a series of personal, professional, and pedagogical reflections on their experience in a new graduate seminar on “Indigenous philosophy.” The authors—a graduate student, professor, and Indigenous course-facilitator—share in the fashion of “Indigenous storywork,” as outlined by Stó:lō pedagogue Jo-Ann Archibald. We begin with the instructor and how he was personally challenged to re-evaluate his roots and philosophical praxis in spite of his experience teaching over several decades. The second section describes a student experience and how they measured the exigencies of decolonization against the esteem that their family holds for Canada’s brand of multiculturalism. Finally, we turn to the Indigenous seminar facilitator and his skepticism over whether the course truly constituted decolonized, or “landed,” pedagogy. Throughout, the authors ask about the demands of decolonization and how philosophical pedagogy may center Indigenous futurity.

Collaborative undergraduate research has been shown to benefit both student participants and faculty mentors, but it is much more widely practiced in the natural sciences than in the humanities. We argue that one key reason why collaborative undergraduate research is seldom practiced in philosophy is because we philosophers have been trained to conceive of ourselves as doing research in the stove-heated room of Descartes rather than in the agora of Socrates. We discuss two types of collaborative undergraduate research projects that philosophers can conduct with students in the agora, namely, projects in traditional subdisciplines of philosophy and projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning in philosophy. We argue that some projects of each type can benefit participating students and faculty mentors alike.

Democratizing the syllabus has been discussed in the fields of sociology and political science but rarely in philosophy. In this paper I will draw upon my experience of teaching Philosophy of Love in an online modality to examine the impact on motivation when students fill in the gaps presented in a democratic syllabus.

In this article, we defend the view that problematic epistemological extremism, which presents puzzles for many learners new to philosophy, is a result of earlier learning at the K–12 level. Confirming this hunch serves as a way of locating the problem and suggesting that recent learning interventions proposed by Christopher Edelman (2021) and Galen Barry (2022) are on the right track. Further, we offer that this extremism is plausibly described as what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls an epistemic injustice. This suggests that disrupting the problem is a boon for learners, the discipline, and good citizenship. In our discussion we introduce work by Derek Muller suggesting that it is important to address the misconceptions involved in epistemological extremism (and its precursors) lest we simply reinforce these problematic misconceptions for the worse—inhibiting student learning, reproducing challenges to good citizenship, and leading to a discounting of many ways of knowing.

This article is an introduction to moral concepts. Its purpose is to introduce and explain vocabulary that can be used both in examining ethical theories, and in talking about the ethically significant aspects of concrete situations. We begin by distinguishing descriptive and normative claims, and explaining how moral claims are a special type of normative claims. We then introduce terms for the moral evaluation of actions, states of affairs, and motives. Focusing on the question ‘what should be done?,’ we talk at some length about factors that influence the moral evaluation of actions, such as rights, duties, and consequences. We also cover related concepts such as justifications, excuses, praise, and blame. Finally, we discuss ethical reasoning and the roles played therein by principles, values, and theories.

At or near the beginning of many textbooks and syllabi in applied or professional ethics is a unit on philosophical moral theories (such as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics). However, teaching such theories is of questionable value in this context. This article introduces the moral vocabulary approach. Instead of burdening students with complex ethical theories, they are introduced to the logic of elementary moral concepts. This avoids many of the drawbacks of teaching ethical theories, while preserving the benefit of equipping students with the conceptual tools they need to critically analyse ethical issues.

This article draws on authors’ experiences as fat-bodied white women philosophers, empirical research about fat discrimination, and common teaching topics and practices to reflect on fat stigma in dominant forms of teaching philosophy. We situate our critique in fat studies literature, locating the “normal professor body” within eugenic social and political movements, and the transatlantic slave trade. We outline how fat stigma specifically applies to historical and contemporary forms of Western canonical teaching practices and materials. Many of the topics philosophers teach on practical rationality evoke stereotypes about fat-bodied people as bad eaters, and activate stereotype threat for fat philosophers, thus affecting performance and credibility. We offer the case of “fat man” hypotheticals in contemporary analytic ethics as cases of perpetuating stigma, thereby undermining their pedagogical efficacy. We conclude by offering recommendations for teaching in ways that mitigate the influence of fat stigmatizing stereotypes and stereotype threat for fat philosophers.

While discussion is a hallmark of philosophy teaching methods, some instructors express doubt as to the possibilities for its meaningful implementation in online classes. Here, I report on a routine that utilized synchronous and asynchronous discussion strategies to promote community-building and critical engagement in an educational philosophy class forced online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before class, students used social annotation software to collaboratively read a text. During class, we pursued whole-group discussion using student-centered strategies before breaking into partners for small-group work on a written discussion prompt. After class, students individually replied to the prompts written by these small groups. Results show that students found that this routinized structure promoted engagement with the course content and each other, ultimately building a community that supported critical thinking in the virtual classroom. Implications are raised regarding instructor workload and control over course outcomes.

Tragedy feels disempowering and the confluence of tragedies since the beginning of 2020 can overwhelm one’s sense of agency. This paper describes how we use a civic engagement (CE) project to nurture radical hope for our students. Radical hope involves a desire for a positive outcome surpassing understanding, as well as an activity to strive to achieve that outcome despite its uncertainty. Our CE project asks students to identify ethical issues they care about and respond in a fitting way, questioning the assumption that their efforts do not matter, and imagining creative ways to make a difference that are in their power. We scaffold our CE project in order to nurture hopeful possibilities for students by offering real-world, feasible pathways for addressing systemic problems.

Designing a successful graduate seminar should account for more than just the content to be conveyed and the completion of the standard seminar paper. This article dissects the seminar structure, revealing some of what is obscured by the “hidden curriculum” of graduate education, with an eye toward transforming the climate in philosophy. I begin with a brief review of literature on graduate teaching and inclusive teaching in philosophy. I then examine four components of a typical graduate seminar: the faculty instructor of graduate courses, the graduate students themselves, the material selection, and the course requirements. Reflecting on the graduate seminar compels revisiting learning goals, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility, and adopting a more intentional approach to graduate course design that ties course goals to specific activities and assessments for the life of the professional philosopher.

Despite their difficulty, the writings of Aristotle can be effectively used in an introductory course. This does not mean that students should be assigned whole books, or even chapters. Instead, their readings should consist of individual paragraphs. To justify this procedure, the paper draws on the work of Reviel Netz, who has argued that the “basic discourse unit” in Aristotle’s writings is precisely the “paragraph.” With this term he does not refer to the feature of modern writing signalled by indentation, for that did not exist in antiquity. Instead, he means a short, logically self-contained segment, discernible through specific linguistic markers. To illustrate how a close reading of an Aristotelian “paragraph” can be pedagogically fruitful, this paper offers a case study: the opening lines of the Metaphysics (980a20–27), in which Aristotle argues that “all human beings by nature desire to know.”

This article is about teaching probability to students of philosophy who don’t aim to do primarily formal work in their research. These students are unlikely to seek out classes about probability or formal epistemology for various reasons, for example because they don’t realize that this knowledge would be useful for them or because they are intimidated by the material. However, most areas of philosophy now contain debates that incorporate probability, and basic knowledge of it is essential even for philosophers whose work isn’t primarily formal. In this article, I explain how to teach probability to students who are not already enthusiastic about formal philosophy, taking into account the common phenomena of math anxiety and the lack of reading skills for formal texts. I address course design, lesson design, and assignment design. Most of my recommendations also apply to teaching formal methods other than probability theory.

It is no secret that we, as a society, struggle to have productive conversations about race and gender. Discussions about these issues are beset with obstacles, from the inherent power dynamics between conversation partners to the fear that participants feel about saying something harmful. One practice that can help address these difficulties is intergroup dialogue—sustained, small group discussions with participants from a variety of social identities. In this paper, we detail how we incorporated intergroup dialogue into a 120-student “Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” course, providing a blueprint for anyone who wants to help their students develop the ability to take part in fruitful conversations surrounding these challenging topics. We provide strategies for how to design intergroup dialogues to avoid many of the common pitfalls of such conversations, strategies that ultimately helped our students become more likely to initiate and participate in worthwhile discussions on race and gender. We expect our experiences to be especially helpful for instructors of large courses, where making time for small group dialogue is quite challenging, but many of the practices we used can also be adapted for smaller scale courses as well.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility.

This paper describes an application of mastery learning to the teaching of philosophical writing—an approach I call “the Levels System.” In this paper, I explain the Levels System, how I integrate it into my course, and the pedagogical research supporting the principles of mastery learning on which it is built. I also compare the Levels System to Maryellen Weimer’s “menu approach,” Linda Nilson’s “specifications grading,” and Fred Keller’s “personalized system of instruction.” I argue that the Levels System has many of the virtues of these other systems and some additional virtues of its own.

I argue that campus closures and shifts to online instruction in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic created an obligation to offer courses asynchronously. This is because some students could not have reasonably foreseen circumstances making continued synchronous participation impossible. Offering synchronous participation options to students who could continue to participate thusly would have been unfair to students who could not participate synchronously. I also discuss why ex post facto consideration of this decision is warranted, noting that similar actions may be necessary in the future and that other tough pedagogical cases share important similarities with this case.

Academic internships are increasingly common in other disciplines, but have not been discussed or implemented widely in the discipline of philosophy. This article fills this gap by discussing the potential benefits of philosophy internships and addressing two important questions: whether there is something different about philosophy—possibly its abstractness, versatility, or what I refer to as “pluripotency”—that renders the benefits of internships out of reach for many philosophy students, and whether philosophy faculty should be responsible for developing and implementing philosophy internships. In this article, I argue that there is nothing about the discipline itself that prevents philosophy majors from experiencing the benefits of academic internships and that, among the different possible internship coordinators, philosophy faculty bear primary responsibility for developing academic internships in philosophy and assisting philosophy students as they transition from college to professional career.

I argue that colleges should include philosophy courses as general-education requirements. I begin by explaining the prima facie case against general-education requirements and the need for philosophers to defend their courses’ place in the general-education curriculum. Next, I present two arguments for philosophy as a general-education requirement. The first is the Argument from Content: that philosophy courses’ content tends to match the intended nature and purposes of general-education courses. The second is the Argument from Outcomes: that even if philosophy courses didn’t match the intended purposes of general-education courses, they would still be appropriate as general-education requirements, because there is empirical evidence that philosophy courses produce valuable skills and knowledge in students.

Here I describe a game that I use in my logic classes once we begin derivations. The game can help improve class dynamics, help struggling students recognizes they are not alone, open lines of communication between students, and help students of all levels prepare for exams. The game can provide struggling students with more practice with the fundamental rules of a logical system while also challenging students who excel at derivations. If students are struggling with particular rules or strategies in the system, the game can be tailored to address them. I explain how the game has evolved since I started using it, highlighting the pedagogical benefits of the changes I have made, and (in the appendix) I provide examples of the handouts I distribute and a “checklist” to use before, during, and after the game.

Many students struggle to enter moral debates in a productive way because they automatically think of moral claims as ‘just opinions’ and not something one could productively argue about. Underlying this response are various versions of a muddled distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘opinions.’ This paper outlines a way to help students overcome their use of this distinction, thereby clearing an obstacle to true moral debate. It explains why the fact-opinion distinction should simply be scrapped, rather than merely sharpened. It then proposes a different distinction well suited to replace it. Finally, it outlines an activity which can be used to teach the new distinction, as well as a number of benefits to attempting the whole replacement process.

This article traces my own pedagogical journey to find strategies for teaching critical thinking that emphasize intellectual cooperation, empathy, and argument repair, a journey that found me frequently turning to sources outside of philosophy, including work in intergroup dialogue and pedagogical work in rhetoric and composition. Theoretically, the article showcases Maureen Linker’s notion of ‘cooperative reasoning’ (2015), sets it against the ‘adversary paradigm’ Janice Moulton critiques, and illustrates how Peter Elbow’s challenges to critical thinking as a ‘doubting game’ resonate with Linker’s work. Practically, it illustrates the structure and the role of peer-to-peer dialogues in my own reasoning classroom, an enactment of a cooperative, belief-based approach to reasoning inspired by Linker and Elbow alike, while also learning from the methodologies of intergroup dialogue.

How can we use what cognitive science has taught us about perception to improve the critical thinking skills of our students? What, for instance, does it tell us about subjects who think they’ve seen Bigfoot, ghosts, and other “weird things”? I explore two approaches for giving students some empirically based tools for examining cases like these. The first, which I call the “we see what we want to see” approach, focuses the idea that beliefs and desires can shape our visual experiences. This approach, however, encourages students to view subjects who report weird experiences as being cognitively irresponsible and worthy of derision. The second approach, which I call the “we see what our evolutionary ancestors needed to see” approach, asserts these experiences are the result of evolutionarily designed perceptual mechanisms that specialize in representing human-like qualities. Fortunately, the second approach does not create the same problematic attitude in students as the first.

Medical ethics is normally taught in a combination of three ways: through discussions of normative theories and principles; through for-and-against debating of topics; or through case studies (narrative ethics). I want to argue that a fourth approach might be better, and should be used more: teaching medical ethics through medical law. Medical law is already deeply imbued with ethical concepts, principles and reasons, and allows the discussion of ethics through the “back door,” as it were. The two greatest advantages of the law are (i) its familiar authority, especially among the disengaged medical students who have little interest or respect for the subject of ethics; and (ii) its focus on the reality of the people and the tragedies discussed (as opposed to the abstractness of a lot of ethical discussion). Finally, I argue that medical law, unlike ethics, allows more efficient and more detailed MCQ assessment.

The distinction between weak and strong forms of critical thinking is a hallmark of Richard Paul’s pedagogy. He maintains that good reasoning entails a personal commitment to fair-mindedness. In this brief essay, I argue that Paul’s conception of fair-mindedness conflates cognitive empathy with empathetic concern and altruism. One’s understanding another’s perspective by no means entails approving of it, and one may seek to better grasp this standpoint for purely selfish reasons. Depending upon the circumstances, the other could be one’s competitor, enemy, mark, or even intended victim. This implies that while we may wish that the world were otherwise, even very bad people can be highly effective critical thinkers.

This paper describes an approach to teaching the philosophy of science to science students that was developed in a context where the course is a lower-level requirement for all natural science majors. This audience made it appropriate to reconsider standard approaches to the field and resulted in an innovative pedagogical strategy subsequently used, in modified form, in more traditional philosophical contexts. This paper describes the pedagogical approach, explains reasons for it, motivates more specific ways of enacting it, and assess its value, not only for science students, but for philosophy majors as well.

Points-based grading, though now traditional, faces powerful critiques: Such grading creates a low road to passing, it undermines motivation, it wastes time, and it causes stress. It creates an illusion of mathematical precision. It is unfriendly to necessary conditions for satisfactory performance. This paper defends the alternative of specifications grading. Specifications grading grades only on whether work meets a set of expectations for satisfactory performance, with the expectations set at a high but reachable level. With a high bar also comes opportunities to revise unsatisfactory work. I summarize arguments from the literature in support of the system, but I also give account of my two-year experiment in philosophy courses with specifications grading. Compared with points-based grading, specifications grading appears to motivate students better and helps them learn more. I consider objections from both traditionalists and so-called ‘ungraders.’ The former hope to secure the benefits of specifications grading while still keeping points. The latter favor eliminating grading altogether.

In this article, I present a philosophy-of-language assignment which emerges as the hero in a fable with the following trio of villains: Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom. Building on Penny Weiss’s “Making History of Ideas Classes Relevant” (Teaching Philosophy 25[2] [June 2002]: 123–30; https://doi.org/10.5840/teachphil200225225), and serving students taking an introductory course which covers (at least) Western theories of meaning, the “You are there” essay conquers Abstractness by requiring students to make a connection between the material and their lives, rendering theories relevant. It conquers Parroting by requiring them to apply theories to new examples. And it conquers Boredom by producing papers whose originality can not only surprise but also remind the instructor reading them how meaningful the original theories are. In addition, I present a way to adapt the Weiss framework such that it’s (more) inclusive, and discuss my experience piloting and negotiating the assignment. As appendices, I include materials which an instructor can use to scaffold the assignment. Note that beyond dispatching Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom, the assignment invites collaborative/cooperative learning, fosters learner autonomy, and lends itself to online course delivery.

In this paper, I argue that there are significant instances of educational injustice in the context of philosophy teaching that can be effectively reduced by an increased implementation of digital technologies. More specifically, I show that there are good reasons to believe that testimonial injustices constitute serious instances of educational injustice that will frequently occur in philosophy classes. Using digital tools to anonymize student contributions opens up a promising way of dealing with these injustices. If convincing, my arguments give reason to perceive epistemic injustices in educational settings as a serious threat to educational justice and to reconsider the implications of increased digitalization for issues of educational justice.

This article attempts to contribute to the literature on what has become known as “student relativism” by suggesting that in many cases it is a symptom of a broader and equally problematic pre-reflective epistemological framework that students often bring with them to the study of philosophy. It goes on to describe the notion of a “dialectical fact,” and to propose that this concept can be a useful pedagogical tool for helping students to progress beyond that framework.

In this paper we argue that the approach for teaching non-Western, and specifically Chinese philosophy to undergraduate Western students, does not have to be significantly different than that for teaching philosophies from “Western” traditions. Four areas will be explored. Firstly, we look at debates on teaching non-Western philosophy from the perspective of themes or traditions, suggesting that, as an overarching guideline, it is mote discussion. Secondly, in terms of making generalizations, we argue that no more explanation of the “Chineseness” of Chinese philosophy be offered than the “Germanness” of German philosophy, or “Greekness” of Greek philosophy. Thirdly, that lines of philosophical coherences are not limited to regional or cultural bounds. Finally, that foreign language be used in a way that invites understanding and does not close ideas off to students. In sum, we suggest applying well proven methods of teaching “Western” philosophy to Chinese (and other “Non-Western”) philosophies. After all, value of Chinese and other “Non-Western” philosophies comes not from their being “Chinese” or “Non-Western,” but from being philosophical.

In this article, I reflect upon my experiences developing an asynchronous Philosophy for Children (P4C) course toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that P4C practitioners ought to reconsider what we mean by community in Community of Inquiry (CoI). The traditional Community of Inquiry model emphasizes face-to-face interactions in which the children and facilitator(s) are traditionally seated in a circle, synchronously wondering together. The CoI pedagogical model has, once again, served as a methodological starting-point for the place-based P4C I have tried to practice in my teaching, but it was also the model that I had to overcome while developing a virtual P4C course in a pandemic. Specifically, I argue that we ought to broaden vastly what we mean by “community” in “Community of Inquiry” in order to make Philosophy for Children more accessible for a virtual, and even asynchronous, learning environment. Furthermore, I argue that this reconceptualization of “community” is useful not only to our pandemic pedagogy, but also for our post-pandemic future in which face-to-face classes are resumed.

In a group exam, students first do an exam individually and then redo the same exam in small groups. Studies have shown that group exams provide a number of benefits, including improvements in performance, learning, motivation, and preparation, as well as a reduction in anxiety. However, little has been written on whether group exams are fair. This paper aims to discuss and reject three fairness concerns that arise from (i) improved performance, (ii) improved learning, and (iii) accessibility. It also discusses in detail the benefits of improved learning, arguing that they are the most valuable benefit which makes group exams particularly suitable for philosophy education.

I develop Levinas’s analysis of “proximity” to explain how successful faceless class dialogues are possible despite physical social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. I first examine features of Levinas’s notion of proximity within his idiosyncratic approach to “ethics.” Second, I turn to Levinas’s examination of intentionality and questioning in relation to the hermeneutic priority of questioning. Third, I detail some successes and failures in attempts to embody Levinasian proximity in online or masked discussions with students. I draw out contrasts between experiences at two different institutions as well as between curricular and extracurricular experiences. I do this to expose my own vulnerability in this essay itself. Given pandemic conditions as well as Levinas’s theory of proximity, I found that many masked or virtual class discussions—but especially extracurricular group discussions, such as a philosophy club and the Black Student Union meetings—maintained a closeness of community despite social distancing.

I argue that instructor-graded participation assessments, which are one of the most popular ways to incentivize classroom participation, either fail to satisfactorily assess student participation or are open to issues of unconscious instructor bias. I then argue that a better way to assess participation is to use student self-assessments. Student-self assessments not only avoid these issues, but also have other added benefits like cultivating student self-reflection which is associated with academic gains. However, self-assessments pose new worries about under confidence biases and cultural differences for some students from diverse backgrounds. This is particularly worrisome since many students in these situations are already vulnerable to systemic biases. If there is a possibility that self-assessments might reinforce inequalities, great care needs to be taken in how they are designed and implemented. I then present a way to approach student self-assessment surveys and ways to frame classroom participation to help lessen the chance that these self-assessments will reinforce inequalities.

Though sometimes maligned, “trolleyology” offers an effective means of opening and framing, not only classes in ethics, but indeed any introductory philosophy course taking a broadly “puzzle-based” approach. When properly sequenced, a subset of the thought experiments that are trolleyology’s stock-in-trade can generate a series of puzzles illustrating the shortcomings of our untutored moral intuitions, and which thus motivate the very enterprise of moral theorizing. Students can be engaged in the attempt to resolve said puzzles, inasmuch as they’re accessible and compelling, and their resolutions generally easy to achieve. Once thus engaged, students can be directed to the fact that (perhaps unbeknownst to them) they had already rolled up their sleeves and begun “doing philosophy.” In this way, engagement with trolleyological puzzles can serve as a “microcosm” for philosophy more broadly, illustrating the processes of critical thinking that are likewise the stock-in-trade of philosophers across many different domains of inquiry.

This paper examines how philosophy of education textbooks present Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views on women and socialization. It reviews ten texts, involving nine authors, and finds that they generally focus on the concepts of Nature, Negative Education, and Child Development from Books I-III of Emile, but severely restrict mentioning its Book V and The Social Contract. While these results implicitly reflect Rousseau’s historical influence on “progressive” educators, they do not seriously attend to well-established critiques of Rousseau’s sexism and omit acknowledging his intent that Emile’s Negative Education in Nature leads toward his socialization in the General Will.

Conversation is a foundational aspect of philosophical pedagogy. Too often, however, philosophical research becomes disconnected from this dialogue, and is instead conducted as a solitary endeavor. We aim to bridge the disconnect between philosophical pedagogy and research by proposing a novel framework. Philosophy labs, we propose, can function as both a pedagogical tool and a model for conducting group research. Our review of collaborative learning literature suggests that philosophy labs, like traditional STEM labs, can harness group learning models such as Positive Interdependence Theory (PIT) to engage in meaningful discussion and execute projects and research. This article distills PIT into four essential tenets which we argue support student success at both the individual and group levels. Our argument is grounded in two case studies detailing our experiences facilitating different philosophy labs, and demonstrations of how they can foster the continued evolution of philosophical research and pedagogy beyond the single-occupancy armchair.

This piece offers a critique of what is commonly the structure of introductory philosophy textbooks, syllabi, and courses. The basic criticism is that this structure perpetuates the systematic devaluing of the views of historically marginalized and exploited people. The form my critique takes is that of a referee report on a hypothetical manuscript for an introductory philosophy textbook, authored by “Dr. Unspecified.” I examine what the manuscript chooses to focus on and what it chooses to omit from discussion. I thereby outline much of the content typically used to introduce newcomers to philosophy, while illustrating that presenting exclusively that content supports a prejudiced view of philosophy. I try to show how this representation of philosophy marginalizes the concerns and insights of many and reinforces the disproportionate extent to which those who can do philosophy for a living are white, straight, men with typical body morphology. My report also identifies various ways that the content of an introductory philosophy textbook or course could be modified or supplemented in light of the sort of critique my report makes.

What is a philosophy class like? What roles do teachers and students play? Questions like these have been answered time and again by philosophers using images and metaphors. As philosophers continue to develop pedagogical approaches in a more conscious way, it is worth evaluating traditional metaphors used to understand and structure philosophy classes. In this article, we examine two common metaphors—the sage on the stage, and philosophy as combat—and show why they fail pedagogically. Then we propose five metaphors—teaching philosophy as world-traveling, wondering, conducting an orchestra, storytelling, and coaching—that can better respond to the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. Further, these metaphors find their ground in long-standing beliefs about what philosophy is, how it is done, and what it can do for those willing to engage in it. While no single one of them is comprehensive, we think that these models can help us enliven our own thinking about our teaching and the roles we and our students play in our classrooms.

An important part of the work of an introductory philosophy class is learning how to read philosophy. The digital annotation platform Perusall can be useful in both F2F learning environments as well as in virtual learning environments, as it helps students learn how to read philosophy. While the traditional online learning environment relies heavily on the discussion forum to replicate the F2F learning experience, digital annotation is a valuable alternative for promoting student engagement with course material. This paper will describe the platform as well as how to use Perusall to facilitate student participation and close reading of texts.

The study presented here is concerned with the pedagogical and technical issues around the provision of feedback. More specifically, it looks at how feedback is received and interpreted by students and how it can become integrated in a comprehensive plan for supporting philosophy students and helping them develop critical and analytical writing skills. It is especially relevant in post-Covid-19 educational settings, where face-to-face contact is limited and feedback is delivered remotely, potentially opening a gap between instructors’ intentions and student perceptions of the feedback they receive. I discuss tools for eliciting students’ responses to feedback and argue that having a strategy for receiving feedback from students can have a lot of benefits: it provides a timely tool for instructors to check on the effectiveness of their feedback, helps solidify the learning partnership and circumvents some of the problems digital technologies pose for teaching and learning.

Online classes have brought with them challenges, as well as opportunities, for philosophy and philosophical education. The democratization of interactions, the creative tension between anonymity and publicity, and the virtualization and centralization of information that compel participants to focus on the mobility of ideas together make up what the present article calls e-philosophy. The article presents three issues essential to teaching philosophy via the internet: building a framework for communication, syllabus design, and engaging participants. Two major problems specific to China, where the author teaches and works as a philosopher of science, and those related to philosophical education in the internet era in general, are discussed.

What does success in online teaching look like? There are two ways to answer this question. The first defines success in terms of replacement of educational means: for example, how closely does an online lecture approximate its offline counterpart? The second defines success in terms of educational goals: for example, how well does an online lecture facilitate learning, compared with its offline counterpart? The first is a trap: it commits us to an endless online game of catch-up with offline models of teaching. Instead, we should adopt a goal-oriented approach, mindful of obstacles to online teaching. As a case study, I present practices developed using this approach to teach philosophy online in 2020. An important upshot is that this approach leaves us open to ways in which online teaching is actually better than its offline counterpart. I conclude with some examples of these, and discuss their future implementation.

This article shows how the mind-body problem can be taught effectively via an experiential learning activity involving a couple of classroom props: a brick and a jar of ground coffee. By experiencing the physical properties of the brick (shape, weight, length, width) and contrasting them with the olfactory experience of coffee (seemingly dimensionless, weightless, etc.), students are introduced in a vivid way to the well-known difficulty of explaining the mental in physical terms. A brief overview of experiential learning theory and its connection to philosophy is also provided.

Introductory courses in political philosophy would benefit from the incorporation of material on the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, including the story of the foundation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Classroom study of this tradition will serve several purposes: introducing a valuable account of political phenomena such as negotiation, consensus, veto, and rational communication; contributing to the diversity of syllabi; tracing the influence of Iroquois law on Western political institutions; and comparing the Haudenosaunee story to early modern social contract theory, especially Hobbes’s Leviathan. This paper draws connections to relevant topics in a standard, historically-oriented course and suggests learning resources and objectives.

In her book Specifications Grading, Linda B. Nilson advocates for a grading regimen she claims will save faculty time, increase student motivation, and improve the quality and rigor of student work. If she is right, there is a strong case for many faculty to adopt some version of the system she recommends. In this paper, we argue that she is mostly right and recommend that faculty move away from traditional grading. We begin by rehearsing the central features of specifications grading and providing two examples of how to implement it in philosophy classes. In light of the examples, we argue that specifications grading fulfills two of Nilson’s central desiderata (increasing rigor and motivating students) but not the third (saving faculty time). Since specifications grading generates two benefits that when combined increase student learning, without adding or increasing burdens, we conclude that student learning increases when courses are revised to include aspects of specifications grading.

This paper offers a contrast between “content-first” course design, and “skills-first” course design. The traditional lecture format is a paradigmatic example of the former, by the later I mean courses that emphasize the sustained practice of skills integral to the discipline. Two arguments are offered for adopting, other things being equal, the skills-first design. One is the “content-plus” argument that the skills-first course design does a better job of promoting content acquisition than a content-first class. The second argument, the “skills-plus” argument, claims that a skills-first course design has the added value of better promoting philosophical skills as compared with a content-first course.

Augustine’s Confessions would seem an unlikely work to feature in an introductory philosophy course: it appears to offer too much religion, too little philosophy. In fact, this work presents a series of reflections in which varied and interesting philosophical questions arise in the course of ordinary life. After defining the introductory course for which this work might be suitable, I explore its philosophical themes and extend a few suggestions for its use in the classroom. In closing I forward several reasons why an instructor should consider including the book in an introduction to philosophy.

Though numerous disciplines are cultivating pedagogical relationships with the emerging field of digital humanities, philosophy appears to be among the least interested in what digital humanities has to offer. This is a missed opportunity. Through a proper pedagogical framing of both fields, I argue that philosophy educators would benefit from building a pedagogical relationship with digital humanities. First, I outline digital humanities methods and teaching practices, then I identify several core educational aims and teaching methods in philosophy, which I conceptualize in terms of a creative art. Ultimately, I argue that digital humanities practices would enhance philosophy’s education aims by making philosophy more relevant and accessible to students’ needs, by fostering active learning, by establishing more equitable, collaborative participation, and by balancing skill-development with philosophical creation. The goal of this essay is not to replace traditional philosophy pedagogy, but rather to supplement it to better support modern students’ needs.

While small group discussion is invaluable to the philosophy classroom, I think it can be improved. In this paper I present a method that I have developed to better facilitate active learning in the spirit of a philosopher within a Socratic community. My method is to form what I call a “philosophical think tank,” which takes the form of a small group that persists for the duration of the semester (or a large portion of it) in order to overcome deficiencies that can arise if groups are determined anew with each class meeting. After presenting the technique, I offer an overview of results, possible issues, and ideas for future development.

In this article, I describe an approach to teaching ancient practical ethics that encourages learners to engage actively with the ideas under consideration. Students are encouraged to apply a range of practical exercises to their own lives and to reflect both independently and in collaboration with others on how the experience impacts their understanding of the theories upon which such exercises are built. I describe how such an approach is both in keeping with the methods advocated by the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, and also well supported by a wide range of contemporary educational research. I suggest that such active learning strategies encourage students towards a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the philosophical theories under consideration. Practical recommendations for incorporating such an approach into the teaching of applied philosophy are given. I finish by considering the impact such an approach may have on student motivation.

This article argues that integrating philosophy courses and the first-year experience can address the problem of attracting students to the philosophy major and make philosophical material more accessible and engaging. Through a reflection on teaching a first-year honors seminar on the topic of meaning in life, I show how we can use the philosophical tradition to help students with the transition into the university environment and, in the process, give them a sense of the value of philosophy as a tool to think through and evaluate their current experiences. The article demonstrates the value of philosophy to first-year students and shows how philosophy faculty and departments are well-suited to contribute to first-year programming at their institutions. Furthermore, it shows how addressing these issues can help departments recruit students into their major and minors while also sparking a genuine interest in philosophical inquiry.

For disciplines depending upon precise definitions and distinctions, students’ notes provide an avenue for student engagement with skill and content. Activities enliven the classroom, and those discussed here can also help students develop and exercise critical thinking skills through note-taking. Lecturing and experiential learning happen hand-in-hand when the instructor uses teaching about notes and note-taking as a method for critical engagement with class content. In this paper, I integrate research on the cognitive function of student note-taking with research on student engagement—particularly, motivating student learning, engaging students with texts, lecture, or discussion, and promoting metacognition about learning practices—by arguing that the instructor who teaches and emphasizes student note-taking elevates note-taking to a method of student engagement and daily critical thinking practice; I discuss particular methods for supporting teaching note-taking, methods that promote active learning, student engagement, and student understanding (and could be utilized in a variety of classes).

This article seeks to shine some light on the teaching demonstration from the perspective of observers using three guiding attributes of effective teaching: connection, commitment, and coachability. Discussing what observers are looking for and how observers interpret what is seen, the article presents the basic forms, common myths, and practical wisdom for teaching demonstrations. By reframing the goals of the teaching demonstration, the article demystifies a key part of the campus interview for the academic job market.

We created Justice: The Game, an educational, role-immersion game designed to be used in philosophy courses. We seek to describe Justice in sufficent detail so that it is understandable to readers not already familiar with role-immersion pedagogy. We hope some instructors will be sufficiently interested in using the game. In addition to describing the game we also evaluate it, thereby highlighting the pedagogical potential of role-immersion games designed to teach political philosophy. We analyze the game by drawing on our observations as designers and playtesters of Justice, along with feedback from students obtained in focus-groups conducted shortly after playtesting ended. We present evidence that Justice, compared to conventional instructional methods alone, plausibly enhances student learning of philosophical skills and content by requiring them to practice those skills and put their content-area knowledge to use in a highly-motivating and engaging context.

The past three years have seen a steady growth of interest in researching and practicing Philosophy for Children (P4C) in educational settings in China because many educators and administrators consider it as a coherent curriculum for developing student critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinking. Excited and gratified with children’s philosophical sensitivity and enthusiasm, three representative Elementary Schools in mainland China, namely South Station Elementary School from Yunnan Province, Shanghai Liuyi Elementary School, and Washi Elementary school from Zhejiang Province, started to practice P4C in the late 1990s and the early twenty-first century. Without succumbing to the aggravated uniformity of the educational system, the three schools demonstrated innovative ways to reform their educational practice, which helped to develop a different form of Chinese educational praxis. This study provides a review on three schools’ P4C practice from the perspective of motivation, development of school-based curricula, the mode and effect of P4C. The three schools found Lipman’s P4C curriculum inspiring but, for the most part, culturally and contextually inappropriate, thus developed their own P4C textbooks, pedagogy and conceptual framework. The study further offers glimpses of P4C historical development in the past thirty years in the model schools, and discusses the challenges, opportunities, existing methodological approaches, theoretical and practical tensions that Chinese P4Cers experienced when P4C being practiced. Then it proposes methodological advancements and possibilities of future P4C practice and research in mainland China.

The rapid development of the internet and the growth of the cyberspace is the most significant phenomenon of our times. The cyberspace puts pressure on all of us to adapt to its constraints. Its influence is also palpable in philosophy, and on the teaching of philosophy in particular, and there is increasing pressure to adapt philosophical education to the internet format. This paper argues that such pressure is not necessarily conducive to better education in philosophy, which requires more discursive and abstract reasoning.

Student relativism is a widespread phenomenon in philosophy classes. While the exact nature of student relativism is controversially discussed, many authors agree on two points: First, it is widely agreed that SR is a rather problematic phenomenon, because it potentially undermines the very purpose of doing philosophy—if there is no objective truth, arguing seems to be pointless. Second, it is widely agreed that there will be some close connection between SR and a tolerant attitude towards conflicting opinions. In this paper, I will argue that if these two assumptions are true, then discussing some basic philosophical insights about the concept of tolerance with students will be a promising new strategy of dealing with SR.

I present Modern Symbolic Logic, an introductory philosophy course in first-order logic, as a blended course. A blended course integrates online video learning with in-class activities, out of class supports, and deliverables into a cohesive and mutually supporting package. Blended courses are an enhancement on hybrid courses, which focus on online video learning but not on the additional supports needed for an effective learning experience. This paper has two central aims. The first is to present a blended course in action in order to address a need in the literature for detailed reports of blended classes. The second is to advance an iterative approach to blended course design that significantly lowers the bar of entry for instructions hoping to create a blended course.

In this paper we consider the ability to master a set of methods for moral reasoning as a form of ethical competence. These methods can be roughly assembled under the headings information, vividness, and coherence. We distinguish between the theoretical characterization of ethical competence and what we take to be its practical role and argue that the ability to master these methods fits the theoretical characterization of such competence as well as fulfils its practical role. An important upshot of this result is that these methods are suitable as a basis for ethics education at various levels, at least when the goal of such education is partly practical: to provide tools for reaching justified moral decisions. Consequently, we encourage ethics educators who teach ethics with this goal to design their educational approaches in such a way that these methods are taught and practiced.

Slowly, we are gaining a deeper understanding of the persisting psychological trauma experienced by students at colonial universities, and beginning to recognize that the Eurocentric curricula and pedagogies must change if students such as the “born-frees” in post-Apartheid South Africa are to flourish. In this article, I present a sub-Saharan African concept of “the ethical teacher,” and use this to ground a “ubiquitous action-reaction” teaching model. I use these concepts to develop a decolonized pedagogy – a teaching methodology that avoids a number of harmful colonial teaching practices in philosophy. I suggest a number of novel ways of accommodating a “decolonized education” with a view to inspiring teachers of philosophy in colonial countries globally. I propose a new, malleable pedagogical model that is particularly useful in the colonial context, since its uniqueness lies in the African ethical framework that grounds it. However, I contend that philosophy educators globally will benefit from taking the principles proposed in this article seriously.

In this article I argue that the best way to ensure that students engage with assigned reading is by having open-ended questions that require textual interpretation to accompany every class session. Although this runs contrary to a recent trend of using multiple-choice questions or true/false questions to ensure reading compliance, using questions that require written responses has four key benefits: (1) such questions result in 75 percent of students completing the assigned reading; this leads to more successful class discussions, and a deeper dive into the course material. (2) Daily assignments can be used to develop specific skills that the instructor would like students to demonstrate. (3) When students come to class having completed the reading, it is much easier to assign productive group assignments. (4) When students engage in significant reading and writing tasks within a semester, critical thinking, reading and writing skills are more likely to be improved.

We believe that intellectual humility is an essential intellectual virtue for university students to foster. It enables them to excel as students of philosophy and other disciplines, to navigate the fast-changing world inside and outside academia, and to flourish in interaction with others. In this paper, we analyze this virtue by singling out two distinct but related aspects: the openness-aspect and the care-aspect. The former makes one value a dialogue with those who have different views from one’s own. The latter aspect involves searching for implicit assumptions one brings to encounters with one’s object of inquiry and trying to study this object as unique and irreducible. We discuss four learning activities we developed for the philosophy bachelor course “Who are we? Philosophical views on humans and the gods” at University College Utrecht (the Netherlands). Throughout this paper, we show extracts from the students’ assignments, reflections, and evaluations. These extracts indicate that students developed both aspects of intellectual humility —openness to different views and care for the uniqueness of each object of inquiry— and acknowledged their importance.

In a previous article (2019), I motivated and defended the idea of teaching philosophy through computer science. In this article, I will further develop this idea and discuss how machine learning can be used for pedagogical purposes because of its tight affinity with philosophical issues surrounding induction. To this end, I will discuss three areas of significant overlap: (i) good / bad data and David Hume’s so-called Problem of Induction, (ii) validation and accommodation vs. prediction in scientific theory selection and (iii) feature engineering and Nelson Goodman’s so-called New Riddle of Induction.