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

How should scholars and teachers of feminist philosophy understand Wollstonecraft’s work “Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman”? This paper contends that Wollstonecraft’s work has received far too little attention, that the work is her most sophisticated statement on women’s oppression, and that it can be used as a springboard for approaching contemporary feminist questions while simultaneously supplying these questions a historical context. In putting forward these positions, the paper provides four compelling reasons for including “Maria” in courses on feminism and why this work should be used instead of Wollstonecraft’s more famous “Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”

In writing papers, students confront two obstacles. First, they may not know what philosophical writing is, mistaking an extended statement of their opinion for a philosophy paper. Second, some students lack certain key writing skills and so have difficulty organizing and conveying their view on a philosophical issue. In addition to reading good philosophical works, students need practice writing, editing, and revising their work and so rough drafts become a key component in teaching philosophical writing. This paper outlines the traditional procedure for rough drafts, highlights some difficulties with this approach, and then details an alternative approach that is advantageous in several ways. In addition, an example classroom handout is provided that introduces this alternative procedure.

Many college and university courses are complemented by collaborative or cooperative activities such as role playing, team projects, or problem solving in small groups. This paper summarizes the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration in professional ethics, describes two courses (Engineering Ethics and Professional Ethics) that involved a fieldwork component where students were required to interview a group of professional who deal with an ethical problem, and articulates the pedagogical value of complementing a course using a fieldwork assignment. By integrating a fieldwork assignment into philosophy courses, students are not only better able to connect classroom learning to concrete ethical problems associated with a given profession but also, since fieldwork is conducted in groups, acquire a deeper understanding of collective moral responsibility.

Students often suffer from what might be called “ethics anxiety,” a kind of alienation from moral discourse due to a fear that another’s values will be imposed upon them. A consequence of this anxiety is that students detach themselves from participating in moral deliberation. This paper proposes a way of thinking about moral judgments aimed at assuaging the fears of students who are skeptical about any moral claim that is not wholly personal or cultural. Rather than viewing moral judgments as imperatives that aim to impose one’s values on another, moral judgments ought to be understood as truth claims that are practical or action-guiding.

Rather than being random deviation, student errors can be a source of insight into the nature of student difficulties. This paper reports on (and offers pedagogical advice concerning) many common student errors in the construction of proofs, in the application of inference and replacement rules, and in the choice of proof strategies. In addition, a detailed description of the bottom-up strategy for “working backwards” is supplied, along with a discussion of the main difficulties students face when trying to solve proofs in this fashion. Ultimately, it is argued that students can employ both top-down and bottom-up proofs strategies by making use of a graphic proof representation.