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:

When I was asked to develop a syllabus for ``Introduction to Philosophy’’, I quickly realized that breadth was not a reasonable goal. I also decided that my primary aim, relatedly, would not be to teach the students about various points of view in philosophy, but rather to teach them about philosophical thinking as a skill that one can develop. In particular, I chose to focus on the skills of reading an argument, unpacking and understanding that argument, and then critiquing said argument.

So, I chose to focus on a series of narrower debates. This involved picking a topic (for example: What does it mean to say that something is “true”?) and finding two opposing viewpoints within that topic. Then, students would complete argument diagrams of each viewpoint, which allowed them to more specifically articulate what was at stake in each view point. Essays were specifically focused around articulating the structure of these arguments, and evaluating opposing views, the latter being a skill we first practiced during recitation sections.