Instructor for 80-100 ‘‘Introduction to Philosophy’’

Instructor of Record for the course 80-100 ‘‘Introduction to Philosophy’’. Syllabus here.

``Do we have free will? What is the nature of consciousness? What is truth? These are the sorts of questions that keep us up at night. The purpose of philosophy is to make sense of these questions and attempt to answer them. In the tradition we shall be primarily exploring, philosophy proceeds via arguments. Philosophers begin with some conclusion they wish to argue for, some assumptions, and proceed via some process of inference from those assumptions to that conclusion. We call these sequences of inferences arguments. Breaking down philosophical arguments can help you to break down arguments you encounter in your day to day life, and help you to more adeptly and clearly construct arguments of your own.’’

Description here.

Pedagogical Goals:

This was my second time teaching “Introduction to Philosophy” (See a description of the first time here). Following from the first time, as this was during a semester and not the summer, I had enough extra time to add an additional unit. This became an ethics unit on the ethics of abortion, using Thomson’s violinist argument opposing Don Marquis. On whole, I found that the students found this unit a bit underwhelming, and so later versions of the course changed it. However, structurally, the course was exactly the same as the first time. All weekely assigments were argument diagrams, where students broke down the central argument from that week’s readings. Then, during recitation, the students would use this structure to reason as to which position they felt as stronger and why. The midterm and final exams synthesized these two ideas, asking the students to both explain a position carefully, and then articulate why they felt it as correct or incorrect.