I do a lot of introductory teaching. My first 10 years I didn't teach anything but graduate courses and introductory level courses. This is a consequence of the fact that Georgetown, like many Catholic universities, requires two philosophy courses of every undergraduate. I'm interested in the question of the overall goal we ought to set ourselves in such teaching. I'm interested in General Education courses - either required, or ones that fulfil a distribution requirement in the Humanities, so that there is a pretty wide cross-section of students there not because they especially want to study philosophy.
If an intro were conceived as a first course for potential majors or minors, I think the strategic question would be easy - even if the tactics remain hard: we would introduce them to a reasonable cross-section of the topics, important historical figures, debates, and methods of philosophical practice. But in a Gen Ed course, the vast majority are not going to go on in philosophy. (I currently am teaching a course of 220, and there seem to be 5-10 who might continue.) So what is the goal for the rest of them? What are we/ought we be trying to accomplish?
For the last few years, I've been teaching with a particular focus - namely personhood and freedom. We approach the question of what it is to be a person via four topics and three approaches to each. We look at mind-body, free will, the role of language and society in defining self, and meaning of life and death. I break the views up into dualist, reductionist/eliminativist naturalist, and "stance approaches". So we get
Cartesian dualism, libertarianism, and metaphysical accounts of language (explaining language in terms of propositions, forms, etc.)
Functionalism/behaviorism/etc, reductionist compatibilism (a la Frankfurt) or hard determinism a la Skinner, and naturalist views of language - Chomsky/pinker, behaviorism, etc.
Dennett, Strawson (and Dennett), Social pragmatism - I start with Brandom's "Freedom and Constraint by norms" - etc.
And then this all leads into the question of what constitutes the conditions of a meaningful or valuable life.
My strategic goal in all this, is actually to make them more free, in the substantive sense - to create self-critical, autonomous, reasoning beings who engage with society as we find it in a more active manner.
I don't at all think this is obviously a good goal to have for an intro philosophy course. (I should say that I also try to figure out early who might have the interest and ability to go on in philosophy, and I offer them a chance to adapt their work to that end, via extra meetings, assignments, etc.) But it seems like a reasonable goal. What do others think?
Recent Comments