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 third time teaching “Introduction to Philosophy”. I felt in particular that two units, one on personal identity, and another on ethics of abortion, did not excite the students as much as some of my other units. So, I swapped these out for a unit on feminist political philosphy, using MacKinnon’s “Marxism, Method, and the State” and Hookway’s “Some Varieties of Epistemic Injustice”, and another unit on communitarianism using Gyekye’s “Person and community in African thought” and Odhiambo’s “The Evolution of Sagacity”. The first unit as a huge success. I as able to use MacKinnon to build on the Peirce/Aristotle unit on theories of truth, arguing that MacKinnon is engaging with the idea that different approaches to truth have differet political contexts. However, the second unit was less successful, and I would likely swap it out in the future.

This was also the first time I changed my assignment structure. Some students had reported to me that they felt argument diagrams did not accurately assess their understanding of the papers. So, for a few papers, I chose to alter the associated assignment to a very specific short prompt writing assignment. For MacKinnon, for instance, I asked the students to report if either Peirce or Aristotle’s theory of truth would be useful to her in her argument and why. This, too, I believe was very successful. Some studets chose to build on these short prompts for the evaluative portion of their final essays very successfully.