This paper seeks to clarify the advocacy/neutrality debate and to defend a particular form of pedagogical neutrality. What is often referred to as “advocative pedagogy” is really a range of positions, some of which even conflict. Furthermore, there are at least two distinct models of neutrality in the debate. The author identifies and clarifies various models of advocacy and neutrality, arguing that the significant debate to be had is not between advocacy and neutrality generally, but between partisan advocacy and procedural neutrality specifically. The author defends procedural neutrality, responding to critics that hold it responsible for student relativism, skepticism, cynicism, and alienation. The author argues that procedural neutrality is desirable, despite not being perfectly attainable, and that it is even compatible with a certain type of advocacy.

This paper chronicles the author’s experience, as an instructor and as an administrator, taking up the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and implementing changes in the curriculum to accommodate a logic student with dyslexia. The author discusses his misconceptions about dyslexia and his attempts to determine more precisely how it affected his student’s reading abilities. While his student struggled with abstract symbol systems (e.g. standard logical notation), the student had no difficulty with sequences of letters. The author elected to teach the introductory logic course with a logical notation composed entirely of letters, namely Lukasiewicz’ notation. The author details the work that went into learning this notation and teaching an introductory logic course in it, including overviews of lessons on semantics, syntax, and introduction/elimination rules for proofs. The student learned the material very quickly and with great success, progressing to moderately sophisticated proofs. The author reflects on how this reformulated version of an introductory logic course squares with the ADA’s language of “reasonable accommodations” and implores professional philosophers to take seriously what the ADA means for their pedagogy.

This paper details a combined graduate/undergraduate course on the Holocaust. This course was designed to cover the legal, social, political, and moral dimensions of the Holocaust, as well as to familiarize students with its significant historical details and persons. Special attention was devoted to the question of why the perpetrators of the Holocaust should be brought to justice, making connections to contemporary forms of prejudice and discrimination and emphasizing that such efforts at justice are not an issue between Jews and Holocaust perpetrators but a matter of upholding the rule of law. The specifics of the legal cases brought against various Nazis in order to try them as war criminals were examined through both modern and contemporary theoretical frameworks (e.g. early legal positivism vs. decisionism), and other key philosophical themes were introduced throughout the term in order to provide frameworks for discussion and critique. The author reviews course requirements and discusses the implicit anti-Semitism expressed by students, concluding with a brief consideration of the value of such a course beyond the classroom.

This paper offers two reasons why students frequently struggle to read Venn diagrams and discusses the semantic knowledge requisite for the appropriate perceptual experience of them. The first reason students struggle is that Venn diagrams require one to intentionally effect a certain figure-background organization that runs counter to the tendency of perceptual organization which attends to similarity in line over similarity in form. The second reason is that, while Venn diagrams rely on Boolean truth conditions to determine shading patterns, Venn diagrams are not capable of literally representing Boolean truth conditions. It is therefore not something within the diagram that tells us what to attend to perceptually, but rather knowledge of the semantic relation between Boolean truth conditions and Venn diagrams. After explaining the semantics of each of these and the discrepancy between them, the author argues that Venn diagrams are nevertheless capable of metaphorically representing Boolean truth conditions. This metaphorical representation is addressed in detail and the author concludes that this form of representation does not tell against teaching Venn diagrams as a method for testing validity, especially since their legibility is greatly increased with the semantic knowledge expounded here.

Anselm’s Proslogion argument is fascinating, important, and notoriously difficult. Many introductions to the argument are either as difficult as the original (such as those that use modal concepts to explain it) or are unfaithful to it. This paper presents an accessible introduction, faithful to the original, which breaks the argument down into four basic components: “That-Than-Which-a-Greater Cannot-be-Conceived,” “From Conceptual Existence to Real Existence,” “From Real Existence to Necessary Existence,” and “‘That-Than-Which-a-Greater Cannot-be-Conceived’ as God.”

This paper explores the educational purposes served by teaching the film 12 Angry Men. In a critical thinking course, one usually emphasizes the importance of examining one’s own and others’ beliefs for coherence and consistency, typically with the help of elementary logic (e.g. informal fallacies, basic argument patterns). Since 12 Angry Men consists primarily of arguments and fallacies, stated by members of a jury, about the guilt or innocence of a young man accused of murder, the film affords students an engaging opportunity to identify and to practice basic critical thinking skills. Moreover, the film offers students a vivid illustration of the ethical dimension of critical thinking skills. After a brief synopsis of the film, the author relates various aspects of its characters and plot to critical thinking skills, reviews discussion themes which help students reflect on the film, and summarizes his success in teaching it.

In 1976, John Immerwahr published a classroom simulation designed to illustrate Hobbes’ model of the mutual transfer of rights in the formation of the social contract. The game is fruitfully seized upon in classrooms from a broad range of disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, etc.) because the lesson of Hobbes’ state of nature and Immerwahr’s game can both be represented and elucidated by principles of game theory. This paper reintroduces a new generation of teachers to what the author calls “one of the finest philosophy simulations ever designed”, offers suggestions on conducting the game and on how Immerwahr’s implementation of it can be improved, and discusses its game-theoretic implications. Whereas Immerwahr’s version of the game approximates the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the version presented in this paper more closely resembles the “Assurance Game”. Accordingly, the results of the author’s game indicate that, if given the chance to cooperate, students do so, and the average student finishes the game better off than in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The author relates the results of his game to the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and concludes by underscoring the richness of the game for philosophical analysis.