Traditional critical thinking courses introduce students to tools for analyzing and evaluating arguments and reasoning. There are, however, good reasons to think that those courses fail to motivate students to make full use of those tools. It is this motivational problem that is the focus of the present paper. In what follows, I present several proposals for overcoming student resistance to the discipline of critical thinking. I offer a three-step strategy for challenging students’ presumption of competency regarding critical thinking, thereby motivating them to embrace the tools we offer. I also sketch how this strategy can be applied in sections of a critical thinking course.

Logic and Proofs, developed at Carnegie Mellon, is the only instructional program that can support a computer-taught course (not justa computer-assisted course) in modern symbolic logic. First I provide a description and an assessment of the program. Then, drawing on my twenty years of experience, initially with Patrick Suppes’ Valid (no longer available), recently with Logic and Proofs, I discuss the very substantial benefits, as well as the challenges to be addressed, when offering symbolic logic via a computer-taught course.

This paper investigates some implications of moral development theory for teaching ethics. A summary of moral development theory, focusing on the work of James Rest, provides the basis for our investigation. We conclude that students in a philosophical ethics course experience greater gains in moral reasoning than a control group. However, the large range of students’ moral development results in discrepancies between their developmental level and the more sophisticated level of reasoning around which philosophy curricula are designed. We explore the implications of this for teaching philosophical ethics and discuss teaching strategies that facilitate growth in moral reasoning.

Surveys of faculty in various disciplines, as well as my own discussions with colleagues, suggest that teachers of philosophy believe service learning is not relevant to their discipline. In this paper I argue that service learning is a valuable pedagogical tool even (and perhaps especially) in abstract disciplines like philosophy. After a short review of the literature on service learning’s effectiveness, I discuss four of the most common objections to its use in philosophy classes, addressing the objections at both theoretical and practical levels. Finally, I describe service-learning components I have used successfully in two introductory philosophy courses.

This paper explains how to use a new software tool for argument diagramming available free on the Internet, showing especially how it can be used in the classroom to enhance critical thinking in philosophy. The user loads a text file containing an argument into a box on the computer interface, and then creates an argument diagram by dragging lines (representing inferences) from one node (proposition) to another. A key feature is the support for argumentation schemes, common patterns of defeasible reasoning historically know as topics (topoi). Several examples are presented, as well as the results of an experiment in using the system with students in a university classroom.

The Law School Admission Test is a half-day standardized exam designed primarily to test the logical reasoning skills of potential law school students. A traditional course in introductory logic does not adequately prepare students for the LSAT. Here I describe the sections of the test, identifying the relevant logic skills students must develop in order to complete them successfully in the time allotted. Then, drawing on my experience teaching a three-week “Logic for the LSAT” course in May 2005, I discuss the main issues you will need to address should you decide to offer such a course.

Following the argument wherever it leads is a piece of well-known and time-honored advice we give to students in philosophy. Using three instances drawn from the history of philosophy, we look at reasons for both adhering to this principle and for sometimes putting it aside in favor of other considerations. We find that the requirement of following the argument where it leads is not a simple demand of logic, but rather a complex norm that is sensitive to various considerations. Some of these have to do with the fact that consistency may be restored to one’s system of beliefs only at a price that one may judge, on cognitive or moral grounds, as too high. Following the argument wherever it leads is thus a norm about the place of reason in our intellectual and practical lives and is therefore a norm that must be evaluated in the context of various extra-logical considerations.