Before they reach university, many U.S. students have been taught incomplete or sanitized histories of racist violence—and the situation is worsening due to legislation that prohibits full discussions of Black erasure. I find it helpful to bridge the knowledge gap by concretizing philosophical concepts of race through exploration of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial materially combats philosophical conceptions of racism by speaking to and against the “inverted epistemology” described by Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract (1997); and questions, though somewhat inadequately, the overlapping injustices described in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989). In this way, the memorial is not a side note or visual aid to discussing philosophy of race and gender—it allows students to concretize what otherwise would be abstract or ephemeral. It is a material thinking-through.

As every teacher of introductory logic can attest, it is a significant challenge to get students to accept the truth table for the material conditional. The main sticking point is that students can be reluctant to accept that a material conditional is true whenever its antecedent is false. In this paper, we examine some popular strategies for teaching the truth table for the material conditional. Ultimately, we find them all lacking because they all rely—in one way or another—on stipulating that the truth table is correct. We argue that stipulation is a less than ideal way to teach the truth table for the conditional, and we, therefore, recommend a new strategy that actually shows students why the material conditional is true when its antecedent is false.

This short work is a contribution to the literature on practices involving artificial intelligence in the academic writing classroom. It presents a centerpiece exercise developed for philosophy and cognitive science students that introduces them to the publishing process. It makes use of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) to generate reviews for short papers written by students, which can then be used as material for students to address—requiring them to make revisions and to reply to the review. It serves the dual purpose of engaging students with their own writing while exercising competences relating to the peer review process. The exercise itself is compelling, and importantly it is easy to execute. No special skills or resources are required on the part of the instructor, making it accessible irrespective of technical ability or institutional resources.

This paper argues that a post-pandemic return to in-person undergraduate philosophy instruction is an opportunity to have students engage in active learning by taking advantage of the physical classroom space. I recommend having students go to the chalkboard or dry erase board to write and draw together. While this is a decidedly retro active learning activity, going to the board is actually well-suited to the post-pandemic philosophy classroom. This paper outlines pedagogical support for having students go to the board and includes ten suggestions for board activities.

Ungrading is one scheme for judging student learning, along with traditional points- or letter-based grading and specifications or pass-fail grading. Ungrading eliminates or minimizes grading altogether, substituting other feedback for assessment instead. This paper considers the joys (or strengths) and perils of (or possible objections to) ungrading. Joys include better and more authentic motivation, better learning, and better student-teacher relationships. Perils include worries about the “work” students will do and how they’ll judge their own learning. Other perils include the workload of providing assessment and guidance without the ease of grades, and also that without grades as extrinsic motivators, students may need help cultivating intrinsically motivated learning. I argue that these and other perils can be met, and that on balance we should favor ungrading over other assessment schemes.

The study seeks to explore the impact of the P4C approach in 7th grade Turkish course on students’ critical thinking dispositions and questioning skills using a convergent parallel mixed design procedure. With the aim of converging the findings to gain a comprehensive understanding of the research topic, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analyzed simultaneously. For a sample of fifty students, qualitative data were gathered through reflective diaries and a question quadrant, while quantitative data were collected through a pre-test and post-test via Critical Thinking Disposition Scale (CTDS). The findings point out to the fact that the P4C approach had a positive influence on students’ critical thinking dispositions and fostered an environment that encouraged students to think critically and ask meaningful questions.

A major part of philosophical work is engagement with argumentative texts. Engaging with an argumentative text involves correctly identifying the arguments presented in this text. In the context of teaching philosophy in school, the difficulty of correctly identifying arguments in philosophical texts is often underestimated. In this paper, I focus on one specific problem with argument identification that has been neglected in philosophy didactics thus far: the problem that there are many non-argumentative phenomena in an argumentative text that are easily misinterpreted as (part of) an argument. It is easy to fall for such phenomena if one is not aware of this problem, thereby misinterpreting the author’s intentions. This paper aims to present and discuss such phenomena, as well as to provide guidelines on how to help students recognize them.

This paper outlines a teaching initiative designed to introduce philosophy to sanctuary seekers and refugees. Despite facing challenges such as scheduling conflicts and inconsistent attendance, the program demonstrated success. Participants displayed a notable comfort with the student-centred pedagogy, exhibited trust in their fellow students, and expressed a willingness to share their perspectives. Additionally, the program shed light on a distinct conception of education and assessment within the sanctuary seeker and refugee community. One notable, and perhaps surprising, insight from our study is that there is no compelling rationale to believe that the study of philosophy provides a greater benefit to sanctuary seekers and refugees compared to any other group. However, it is abundantly clear that it does indeed yield positive results.

Rescuing people imprisoned in Plato’s cave has formed philosophy’s vocation for millennia. I challenge this with a snapshot of a class period where students work through a close reading of the cave passage. I develop a four-fold scaffold of hermeneutic questions to help students identify what is on the lines of the text, what is between the lines, what is behind the lines, and what is beyond the lines. Students use the scaffold to excavate Plato’s cave, nurturing semantic ambiguity for critiquing what we can call “bootstrap and rescue” spins on the text. For example, is the term “allegory” on the lines? To get at what is between the lines, how does the cave episode relate to other elements of the Republic? What was Plato’s historical context behind composing the lines? What might students take with them from interpretations going beyond the lines, beside the sedimented “bootstrap and rescue” readings?

Which philosophical texts should instructors of philosophy choose to foster the development of philosophical skills and competences? In this paper, we would like make some steps towards answering this question by critically comparing two prominent sources of philosophical texts: the philosophical tradition and contemporary research in academic philosophy. Against the background of three basic desiderata that any philosophical text needs to satisfy in order to be eligible for usage in problem-centered educational settings that are particularly suitable for philosophical skill development, we will argue that any choice between these two sources must be sensitive to specific situational circumstances. More specifically, we will show that whether the philosophical tradition or contemporary philosophical research is in a better position to satisfy the three basic desiderata will depend on the specific topic that is taught. Furthermore, we will argue that some such topics also give rise to additional, more specific desiderata that mandate a prioritization of one of these sources of philosophical content.

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, taught himself to read, as a teenager, by spending hours with Plato’s Republic and a dictionary. Later, he describes reading the cave allegory in Republic 7 as “a seminal experience” in his life, “for it had started me thinking and reading and trying to find a way to liberate Black people.” Last year, I decided to teach his book Revolutionary Suicide in my ancient philosophy class alongside Plato. A few key considerations guided my work: I wanted to make sure that Newton and the Panthers were not reduced to Plato cheerleaders. I also needed to introduce the Black Panther Party and its complex histories without overwhelming the students. In terms of Plato, one goal of the class was to offer examples of what might arise as we viewed Republic 7 through this lens. Finally, since the Black Panther Party established many schools—often with inspiring results—I worked to both incorporate key elements of Black Panther pedagogy into my class and design assignments that might allow the students to feel challenged by and connected to these stories.

Bioethics educators have access to a wide range of teaching approaches, including online strategies which became familiar to many teachers during the pandemic. As teaching contexts continue to evolve, reflection on which approaches best fit our pedagogical aims in bioethics is timely. As a contribution to this reflection, we report our experience incorporating podcasts into our students’ learning in two Australian universities at Masters level. We describe the potential of podcasts to positively impact learning and student experience. We explore them firstly as substitutions for lectures and secondly as supplements or substitutions for readings. Based on our teaching practice, we discuss the use of both bespoke teacher-created podcasts and pre-existing third party podcasts. We suggest that podcasts can engage students effectively in bioethical issues, model philosophical dialogue, facilitate high quality class discussion, and give learners access to both mainstream experts and less powerful voices in an immediate and moving way.

I offer and defend methods for fair and principled grade exempting (dropping low grades) from the final grade calculation of undergraduate courses. I begin by addressing Daryl Close’s prohibition of such grade exempting from his article “Fair Grades” (2009) and then identify the types of courses and practices that may employ fair and principled grade exempting. I conclude with objections, replies, and the final view that grade exempting can be fair, principled, and consistent with Close’s overarching grading model: the purpose of grading as an “information process concerning the mastery of course content.”

This paper presents a novel approach to teaching critical thinking. The approach centers around developing the student’s ability to engage in analytic reasoning. By “analytic” in the previous sentence I mean reasoning about analyticity, i.e., coming to know truths about analytic propositions as opposed to synthetic propositions. I consider the ability to engage in this kind of reasoning to be what some philosophers call “conceptual competence”. I argue that focusing on conceptual competence in critical thinking courses benefits philosophy departments in two ways. First, focusing on conceptual competence distinguishes the content of a critical thinking course from, say, courses on logic or probability/statistics. Second, conceptual competence is a skill that is unique to philosophy. I argue that it is also a fundamentally important skill for all students. Thus, teaching critical thinking as conceptual competence can situate philosophy at the center of any school’s general education plan.

Should ethics instructors seek to teach students to act more ethically? As might be expected, teachers of ethics are divided on whether ethics instruction should have character development as a specific goal. In this article, the author elaborates three concerns by raising and answering three questions about the goal of teaching students to be ethical: (1) Is it partisan?, (2) Is it possible?, (3) Is it practical? Ultimately, the author argues that the goal of promoting ethical behavior in an ethics course borders on being a partisan affair, may well not be possible, and is impractical. For these reasons, the author argues it is best to not adopt this goal.

It is plausible that there is a contrast between the rich emotional content which is often connected to laypeople’s interest in philosophy and the emotional austerity of doing academic philosophy. We propose the hypothesis that this contrast is one cause of the disappointment some students experience when they begin to study philosophy in college. We also propose a more demanding hypothesis, according to which this emotional contrast is confused with a semantic difference, which misleads students to think that the questions which initially caused their interest in philosophy are not even considered by academic philosophy research. Moreover, we provide a list of concrete empirical research questions which need to be answered to establish whether these hypotheses are true, and we argue that, if they are true, they give rise to a hitherto unnoticed and important challenge to the teaching of philosophy.

I argue in favor of teaching Plato’s brief dialogue on courage, Laches, in introductory level philosophy classes. My pedagogical approach is dialogical in that the dramatic elements of the dialogue are interpreted as advancing Plato’s philosophical content, and that interlocutors’ positions merit evaluation by students on their own terms. My approach is historical in that the historical biographies of the interlocutors are considered relevant to students’ understanding of philosophical positions. In the dialogue, two generals, Nicias and Laches, offer contrasting advice on military training, and different accounts of courage. I argue that the intuitive appeal, and ultimate flaws, of their views reflects the contrasting bases for their historical reputation at the dramatic date of the dialogue, and historical events that diminished their reputations by the date of the dialogue’s composition. The result is a substantive but approachable landscape for students to explore an issue of intrinsic interest.

Skill building is a widely recognized teaching goal in philosophy. Some well-researched skill building techniques include scaffolded assignment design, low-stakes assignments, and peer-review. Many papers have highlighted the efficacy of these techniques by demonstrating novel course and assignment design; for example, the use of blogging in philosophy courses has been shown to have positive results on student writing. While the efficacy of skill building centered course design on student learning seems uncontroversial, two major problems are typically raised: the time investment for such course design is significant and implementing these techniques in large classes is not possible. The central aim of this paper is to combat this second claim. I present a course designed around skill building that has been successfully implemented in classes of from 120 to 450 students. I show some techniques that make this implementation possible and not unwieldy, and I argue that students both improved their philosophical skills and enjoyed the course design.

In this paper, I offer a skillful performance approach to teaching philosophy based on the ideas of late phenomenologist Hubert L. Dreyfus. For this, I reconstruct the main contributions of Dreyfus’s phenomenological approach to skillful action as a reaction against the cognitivist view of perception and cognition, and I apply these ideas to the issue of teaching philosophy. I conclude that the Dreyfusian approach to teaching philosophy is based on two main ideas: first, that teaching is a skillful action in which the teacher engages with students in a feedback loop relation so that the teacher aims to achieve what I call the maximal teaching grip; second, that this maximal teaching grip is accompanied by a particular experiential state that Hubert L. Dreyfus and Sean D. Kelly named “aliveness,” and that can be traced back to the Heideggerian idea of Augenblick.

In writing his metaphysics in the form of “meditations,” Descartes specifically rejects two other forms: “synthesis,” the form of a deductive proof common in ancient geometry, and “disputation,” the form of a dialectical defense of a thesis against an antithesis. Both forms, Descartes argues, impede a reader’s ability to discover the material “as if for herself” and endanger instilling in her a cynicism towards philosophy. Descartes instead chose the form of “analysis” for the presentation of his metaphysics, which he asserts is the “best and truest method of instruction.” What can philosophy teachers learn from these claims? We too rely on pedagogical forms that are broadly synthetic and disputative, and we too can recognize a student’s sudden suspicion of philosophy. I argue that Descartes’s pedagogical comments offer a solution to help us avoid this classroom danger of misology.

A large body of evidence suggests that the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) improves learning. In courses that use PSI, the material is divided into units, students must pass a test on each unit before advancing to the next unit, there’s no group-level instruction, and students advance in the course at their own pace. While studies find that PSI improves learning outcomes in a wide range of settings, researchers haven’t studied the effectiveness of PSI in critical thinking classes. In this paper, I argue that teaching critical thinking with PSI can effectively promote critical thinking skills. I describe a course that uses PSI to teach critical thinking and I present evidence from pre- and post-tests that indicates that students substantially improved their reasoning skills in this course. I also discuss the costs and drawbacks of using this method of instruction and consider ways of addressing these problems.

Here I describe an exercise that engages students and helps to introduce difficult concepts. The exercise can be used in a variety of courses, it can be tailored to help introduce future course concepts or readings, and it can be used in any level course; it engages both students with strong backgrounds in philosophy and students new to the discipline. The exercise can be used in courses covering ethics, social justice, philosophy of law, criminology, or epistemology. This paper explains the exercise and highlights some ways the exercise can be modified.

It is controversial whether a teacher, not familiar with philosophical literature, can do philosophy with children—in other words, conduct philosophical discussions in philosophy activities with them. There are views in the literature that oppose and support this issue. These debates necessitate more studies. Therefore, we carried out a qualitative case study in a kindergarten with a teacher and fifteen students in Turkey. The teacher implemented fourteen lessons with the students aged 5–6 years. The lesson plans were developed together with the researchers and the schoolteachers in meetings over three months. We collected data through field notes, meeting minutes, interviews and audio recordings. Our findings showed that the teacher was able to exhibit behaviors appropriate for philosophical inquiry during the philosophy activities with children and develop a positive attitude towards the practice. This finding supported the views arguing that a teacher with no previous philosophy training can do philosophy with children.

To step up the activity level of academic philosophizing, “Teaching World Philosophies” will propose that one first engage in a thorough housecleaning before teaching world-philosophical traditions today. In the path that will be sketched as an example in this regard, I will critically engage “the West,” a concept that looms over an adequate academic engagement with world philosophies today. Bringing into the conversation Humayun Kabir’s (1906–1969) analysis of philosophy as a space that can generate and foster critical independent thinking within a society, I will argue that a change in ingrained patterns of conducting a social activity like academic philosophy can be changed. This change might, in fact, be urgent especially in those locales in Europe in which academic philosophy as it is practiced today was crafted.

There are many ways of being a good teacher. Here, I defend a way of teaching Indian and Asian philosophy that consists mainly in reading out loud to and with students—reading slowly, with lots of repetition. Such teaching is analogous to how a Taiji (i.e., “T’ai Chi”) form gets taught in group Taiji classes. This method guides students to adopt the perspectives of the text’s author[s] and imaginatively to inhabit the text’s philosophical space. It differs from lecturing, but it is also unlike “student-centered,” “inquiry-based,” and “active” learning. Indeed, it is “text-centered” or “professor-centered” learning since it invites students to submit to texts and the ways the teacher models engagement with them. This method arguably de-emphasizes “getting students to be able to do philosophy on their own” and instead emphasizes “getting students to have a meaningful experience with philosophy” and “getting students to appreciate the value of philosophy.”

This essay distinguishes between diversity in the content we teach and diversity in the methodologies we use to practice our discipline and transmit it to students. Of all philosophical methods, dialogue is core to our disciplinary identity. However, dialogues rarely stand on their own; they are vehicles for larger philosophical projects. As Pierre Hadot argues, dialogues for early Greeks constituted “spiritual exercises” guiding practitioners toward metaphysical realities beyond ordinary perception. Dialogues in Buddhism, Jainism, and Confucianism convey similar spiritual dimensions. To incorporate these dimensions into the classroom presents a choice: We can take the content of the dialogue and reconstruct it in a deductive argument, i.e., using it as fodder for teaching critical thinking as we normally teach it. This would diversify content without thereby altering disciplinary methods. Or, we can develop pedagogical tools for the dialogical form that consider historical and cultural context as well as contemporary spiritual relevance.

There is a tension between the pedagogical aim of comparative and cross-cultural inclusion and teaching an introductory-level deductive logic course. On the one hand, those who are interested in including non-“Western” sources are doing so in order to expand the philosophical content under consideration in their courses. On the other, it seems that the student learning objectives for deductive logic classes aimed at novices are narrow and specific for the purpose of developing a particular skill. This paper highlights the challenge of teaching logic cross-culturally by arguing that it is inadvisable to do so. Using Jain logic as a case study, it illustrates that even though there is depth available in the content, the contextual support needed to compare logics without being reductive would interfere with the amount of time needed to develop deductive logic skills in students in the first place.

This essay explores the enlightenment story of Abbess Mugai Nyodai (無外如大, 1223–1298), one of the most famous and influential Zen Masters of her time, as a recommendation for a piece to use for introducing students to (Zen) Buddhist philosophy. Because this is a story that features women, as both students and teachers, a story that was intended for pedagogical purposes with a wide-ranging lay audience, and because it is densely packed with rich philosophical material yet at the same time short and easily readable, I argue that it ought to be considered for use in Introduction to Philosophy or Introduction to Asian Philosophy courses, providing a variety of examples of how one might work through the text with students.

Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (c. 400 CE) and Descartes’s Meditations (1641 CE) each begin by questioning commonsense beliefs about the external world. Yet these texts reach different conclusions: Vasubandhu concludes that human experience is misguided due to the error of subject-object dualism, whereas Descartes restores his faith in human experience via epistemological foundationalism and a reaffirmation of Christianity and commonsense. What might we learn from reading these texts in juxtaposition? Could placing Vasubandhu in dialogue with Descartes be a good way to introduce philosophy teachers and students to the riches of South Asian Buddhist philosophy? How do these two texts guide students toward deeper insights about religion, skepticism, and human experience? What might Vasubandhu and Descartes teach their readers—students and teachers alike—if we were to listen carefully?

Comparative philosophy is an important and growing field. Increasingly, philosophy instructors are looking to offer philosophy courses that span more than just one regional culture. Developing a syllabus for a course in comparative philosophy for the first time can be a daunting challenge. Among the many questions one has to ask is how much class time should be spent characterizing the cultural differences between the two philosophical traditions before examining the philosophical traditions themselves and what sort of materials should be covered from each tradition. Perhaps surprisingly, my answer to the first question is little to none. Characterizing cultures brings with it a danger of essentializing that should be avoided in the classroom. As to the sorts of materials to be covered, it is best to look at whole works from individual philosophers, rather than try to compare whole traditions.

Text-generative AI-systems have become important semantic agents with ChatGPT. We conducted a series of experiments to learn what teachers’ conceptions of text-generative AI are in relation to philosophical texts. In our main experiment, using mixed methods, we had twenty-four high school students write philosophical essays, which we then randomized to essays with the same command from ChatGPT. We had ten prospective teachers assess these essays. They were able to tell whether it was an AI or student essay with 78.7 percent accuracy, which is better than the Open AI Classifier. Interestingly, however, they used criteria like argumentative and logical flawlessness and neutrality. We concluded from this that they are using an inverted Turing test and are no longer looking for rationality in machines but for irrationality in humans.

Many instructors see the use of LLMs like ChatGPT on course assignments as a straightforward case of cheating, and try hard to prevent their students from doing so by including new warnings of consequences on their syllabi, turning to iffy plagiarism detectors, or scheduling exams to occur in-class. And the use of LLMs probably is cheating, given the sorts of assignments we are used to giving and the sorts of skills we take ourselves to be instilling in our students. But despite legitimate ethical and pedagogical concerns, the case that LLMs should never be used in academic contexts is quite difficult to see. Many primary and secondary schools are cutting back their writing instruction in an effort to teach to the test; at the same time, many high-end knowledge workers are already quietly expected to leverage their productivity with LLMs. To prepare students for an ever-changing world, we probably do have to teach them at least a little bit about writing with ChatGPT.

This paper presents a summary and discussion of an assignment that asked students about the impact of Large Language Models on their college education. Our analysis summarizes students’ perception of GPT-3, categorizes their proposals for modifying college courses, and identifies their stated values about their college education. Furthermore, this analysis provides a baseline for tracking students’ attitudes toward LLMs and contributes to the conversation on student perceptions of the relationship between writing and philosophy.

This paper argues that the threat Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, pose to writing instruction is both not entirely new and a welcome disruption to the way writing instruction is typically delivered. This new technology seems to be prompting many instructors to question whether essay responses to paper prompts reflect students’ own thinking and learning. This uneasiness is long overdue, and the hope is it leads instructors to explore evidence-based best practices familiar from the scholarship of teaching and learning. We’ve known for some time how to better teach our students to think and write. Perhaps the arrival of LLMs will get us to put these lessons into widespread practice.

Many philosophers have argued that large language models (LLMs) subvert the traditional undergraduate philosophy paper. For the enthusiastic, LLMs merely subvert the traditional idea that students ought to write philosophy papers “entirely on their own.” For the more pessimistic, LLMs merely facilitate plagiarism. We believe that these controversies neglect a more basic crisis. We argue that, because one can, with minimal philosophical effort, use LLMs to produce outputs that at least “look like” good papers, many students will complete paper assignments in a way that fails to develop their philosophical abilities. We argue that this problem exists even if students can produce better papers with AI and even if instructors can detect AI-generated content with decent reliability. But LLMs also create a pedagogical opportunity. We propose that instructors shift the emphasis of their assignments from philosophy papers to “LLM dialogues”: philosophical conversations between the student and an LLM. We describe our experience with using these types of assignments over the past several semesters. We argue that, far from undermining quality philosophical instruction, LLMs allow us to teach philosophy more effectively than was possible before.

In this article, I will outline an assessment model that allows instructors to continuing assigning term papers and argumentative papers without compromising the authenticity of student assessment. This path forward relies upon a pseudo flipped classroom model in which students will complete a scaffolded term paper through a series of in-class assessments that build upon previously completed components. The final steps of completing this assignment will require producing a draft and final version of a traditional term paper outside of the classroom but only after the instructor ensures they have critically thought through the preceding components independently. The intention is to maintain the nuance, critical thinking, engagement with primary and secondary sources, and depth of content comprehension that a thoughtful paper requires, while also ensuring that students are completing the work themselves and not merely outsourcing bits and pieces of it to LLMs.

How can philosophers incorporate the Digital Humanities into their classrooms? And why should they? In this paper, I explore answers to these questions as I detail what I have dubbed “The Monuments Project'' and describe how this project engages with Digital Humanities and teaches students to connect theoretical philosophical concepts with their lives. Briefly, the Monuments Project asks students to apply concepts discussed in our philosophy class (in my case, a Global Aesthetics class) with a monument in their environment. Instead of a traditional paper, students upload MP3s of their observations, pictures and/or drawings of the monument, and text-based responses. The goal of the Monument Project is twofold: to get students to connect what they have learned to a sense of place - the place where they live, and to introduce them to the Digital Humanities.

Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl is a debate-style activity that aims to help students cultivate skills of moral deliberation. While a fair amount has been written about the pedagogical benefits of Ethics Bowl, relatively little attention has been given to potential ethical criticisms of the activity. In this paper I present some reflections on an ethical challenge to Ethics Bowl, namely that applying the characteristic approach of Ethics Bowl to some issues of contemporary ethical controversy can be immoral. The concern is that treating certain topics as “open to debate” conveys disrespect for certain individuals, and risks normalizing harmful viewpoints. I argue that we should take this challenge seriously; indeed, the guiding values behind Ethics Bowl require that we do so. I conclude that conducting Ethical Bowl in an ethical manner requires caution and skill.

The truth table method, natural deduction, and the truth tree method, the three validity proving methods standardly taught in an introductory logic course, are too clumsy for the battlefield of real-life. The “short truth table” test is handy at times, but it stumbles at many other times. In this paper, we set up a general method that can beat all the methods mentioned above in a contest of speed. Furthermore, the procedure can be step-by-step paraphrased in a natural language, so that, unlike the other methods, a real-life logical problem can be analyzed and explained in a real-life language too.

This essay is basically divided into two parts. The first deals with the similarities between reductio ad absurdum arguments and slippery slope arguments. The chief example comes from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which advances an argument for the necessity of government for humane living. The second addresses some pedagogical concerns centered around another pair of arguments: the argument by complete enumeration and the argument by inductive generalization. The illustration for this pair comes from the arts. I finish with a suggestion that pairs like the above can be as effectively used in shorter, non-regular critical reasoning or introductory logic courses as those in mid-term or summer courses. Such pairing can demonstrate a good use of mixing and matching deductive and non-deductive arguments in teaching logic.

The article features an analytic protocol for examining controversial criminal cases in critical thinking courses. The rubric has been designed to be useful to busy critical thinking teachers who wish to draw on student interest in true crime. Six guidelines are presented that are intended to provide the instructor with a convenient scheme for quickly and easily framing classroom discussions. Due to their generality, the guidelines can be readily applied to a wide-range of cases, giving educators a high degree of flexibility in the selection of criminal affairs.

In this essay I advocate for the pedagogical value of public philosophy. In public essays, philosophers craft short arguments in clear prose that avoids disciplinary specific technical terms. Such texts are pedagogically valuable both because they teach students philosophical ideas and also because they offer students a template for philosophical argumentation upon which to model their own writing. Here I report on some of the pedagogical practices I have used for teaching public texts to advanced and introductory level undergraduates in order to demonstrate how public philosophy serves as a valuable resource for the teaching of philosophy that can help students develop their capacity for engaged philosophical thinking and the effective communication of philosophical ideas.

According to the World Bank, South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. It follows that teaching philosophy takes on a unique character in this country. During the initial COVID-19 outbreak, all universities were compelled to move online, entailing that the teaching of philosophy also moved online. However, because of their socio-economic realities, students faced many barriers, and this served to further marginalise already marginalised students. The university campus provides structural support to many of these students that they do not have at home—computer labs, internet access, and residences. With campuses shutting down and learning to move online, many (if not most) of our students faced significant challenges. This paper explores the challenges encountered during this time through empirical research. Five interviews were conducted with philosophy lecturers, and the data was analysed using Atlas.ti. This article therefore provides empirical insight into the challenges faced by philosophy lecturers as they taught philosophy during a pandemic in the “most unequal society in the world.”

Teaching through discussion is perhaps the most fundamental pedagogical technique of philosophy. When done well, discussion can promote long-term, durable learning. It supports an active-learning classroom, sparks higher-order cognition, and helps students construct their own understanding of the material. Yet it is often not done well: it is easily dominated by a few students; it can waste time on tangents and minutiae; it can fail to motivate students to prepare adequately; and it is not easily scalable. In this paper we present a technique, the random discussion leader (RDL), which addresses all of these shortcomings of traditional discussion. Qualitative and quantitative evidence from our quasi-experimental study (n = 279) suggests that RDL leads to better preparation, better engagement with the material, more equitable participation, and higher quality discussions. Additionally, we provide a toolkit for instructors interested in trying RDL, showing how the technique can be adapted to various course settings and materials.

Reflective journals are characterized by their expressive freedom and their intent that students explicitly connect course material to their own life experiences, emotions, beliefs, and feelings. Drawing on research on the use of reflective journals and on the reflections of students in my philosophy courses, I demonstrate how philosophy professors can use reflective journals as a tool to help their students achieve important learning outcomes. By making philosophy personal for students, reflective journals allow students to practice philosophy as a way of life, achieve important metacognitive outcomes, and (drawing on constructivism in learning theory) increase their knowledge and understanding of course content.

Highlighting a progression of exercises, this paper develops a pedagogical model aimed at giving students tools to deliberate about justice from within the Original Position and to debate the broader goals and limitations of justice as fairness. The approach focuses on the idea of a “distribution” of primary goods without relying on caricatures or being intimidated by the more technical features of the presentation. The series of exercises shows students how to move from more intuitive to less intuitive deliberative situations—a move that depends on seeing a just distribution as a product of a pure procedure. In particular, the exercises show the importance of distinguishing carefully between a distribution and an allocation of goods. Finally, it suggests ways in which we may use the theory to engage with our own distributive practices in democratic societies by focusing on the moral significance of persons as equals.

This paper will argue for the teaching of component skills in philosophy. We can distinguish between complex and component skills. Component skills bear a kind of constitutive relation to complex skills. We observe this distinction at use in standard pedagogies related to activities like sports, music performance, and mathematics. The central thesis is that devoting pedagogical resources to the development of component skills, especially at introductory levels, promotes better learning outcomes with respect to complex philosophical skills. Aside from defending this thesis, I will also provide a number of examples of activities that can be used to develop component skills.

The effectiveness of placed-based education in inspiring care for natural and local environments, improving academic performance, dispelling with artificial dichotomies, and grounding philosophic discourse is supported by research whose results have been published not only concerning elementary and alternative settings, but collegiate ones as well. However, very little if any reporting has been done on its effectiveness in formal logic. Given the foundational nature of logic and its tendency to fulfill general education requirements, this is unfortunate. Though I am persuaded it takes more than pedagogical magic wands to inspire self-driven student success, reflections on and examples of the actual constructions of a collegiate level introductory logic course that uses place- based curricula that also boasts some general statistical reassurance seems worth sharing. And, much to my own enjoyment, “sharing” provides me with an opportunity to describe a well-received extra credit opportunity involving a nationally recognized on campus tree tour.

Teaching philosophy online in secondary schools differs from offline teaching. The explanations usually offered for this difference show the cognitivist assumptions of mainstream pre-university philosophy education, meaning that philosophy education assumes that the aim of its practice is the enhancement of internal mental abilities. This paper argues that this view of the goal of education is unwarranted and unnecessarily restrictive, and that it implies an undesirable dichotomy between learning to be competent and being competent. An alternative, based on ecological and enactive views of cognition, is presented as a better conception of philosophical cognitive competence in general, and of the difference between offline and online teaching in particular. This alternative suggests that the difference resembles the difference between life in a zoo and life in the jungle, and that we should teach pupils to do wild philosophy.

Philosophy of Science can be transformed from a course suitable only for philosophy majors into Phil of Sci as Gen Ed, an approachable, engaging, and high-value part of a General Education program for all undergraduates, one that provides concepts and skills for students to use regularly in their everyday lives. The course bestows three major gifts upon students: (i) the motivation to work at becoming a more rational thinker, along with some elementary conceptual tools to help make this a reality; (ii) a suitably rich notion of ‘scientific method’ along with guidance and practice in metacognitively applying this to their own everyday thinking; and (iii) awareness of some of the many challenges of doing good scientific research and some of the questionable methodological practices and institutional forces that further complicate the enterprise, which prepares students from all fields to be more careful and discerning in their reception of scientific communications.

The authors of this essay challenge the notion that “philosophy” is irredeemably Eurocentric by providing a series of personal, professional, and pedagogical reflections on their experience in a new graduate seminar on “Indigenous philosophy.” The authors—a graduate student, professor, and Indigenous course-facilitator—share in the fashion of “Indigenous storywork,” as outlined by Stó:lō pedagogue Jo-Ann Archibald. We begin with the instructor and how he was personally challenged to re-evaluate his roots and philosophical praxis in spite of his experience teaching over several decades. The second section describes a student experience and how they measured the exigencies of decolonization against the esteem that their family holds for Canada’s brand of multiculturalism. Finally, we turn to the Indigenous seminar facilitator and his skepticism over whether the course truly constituted decolonized, or “landed,” pedagogy. Throughout, the authors ask about the demands of decolonization and how philosophical pedagogy may center Indigenous futurity.

Collaborative undergraduate research has been shown to benefit both student participants and faculty mentors, but it is much more widely practiced in the natural sciences than in the humanities. We argue that one key reason why collaborative undergraduate research is seldom practiced in philosophy is because we philosophers have been trained to conceive of ourselves as doing research in the stove-heated room of Descartes rather than in the agora of Socrates. We discuss two types of collaborative undergraduate research projects that philosophers can conduct with students in the agora, namely, projects in traditional subdisciplines of philosophy and projects in the scholarship of teaching and learning in philosophy. We argue that some projects of each type can benefit participating students and faculty mentors alike.

Democratizing the syllabus has been discussed in the fields of sociology and political science but rarely in philosophy. In this paper I will draw upon my experience of teaching Philosophy of Love in an online modality to examine the impact on motivation when students fill in the gaps presented in a democratic syllabus.

In this article, we defend the view that problematic epistemological extremism, which presents puzzles for many learners new to philosophy, is a result of earlier learning at the K–12 level. Confirming this hunch serves as a way of locating the problem and suggesting that recent learning interventions proposed by Christopher Edelman (2021) and Galen Barry (2022) are on the right track. Further, we offer that this extremism is plausibly described as what Miranda Fricker (2007) calls an epistemic injustice. This suggests that disrupting the problem is a boon for learners, the discipline, and good citizenship. In our discussion we introduce work by Derek Muller suggesting that it is important to address the misconceptions involved in epistemological extremism (and its precursors) lest we simply reinforce these problematic misconceptions for the worse—inhibiting student learning, reproducing challenges to good citizenship, and leading to a discounting of many ways of knowing.

This article is an introduction to moral concepts. Its purpose is to introduce and explain vocabulary that can be used both in examining ethical theories, and in talking about the ethically significant aspects of concrete situations. We begin by distinguishing descriptive and normative claims, and explaining how moral claims are a special type of normative claims. We then introduce terms for the moral evaluation of actions, states of affairs, and motives. Focusing on the question ‘what should be done?,’ we talk at some length about factors that influence the moral evaluation of actions, such as rights, duties, and consequences. We also cover related concepts such as justifications, excuses, praise, and blame. Finally, we discuss ethical reasoning and the roles played therein by principles, values, and theories.

At or near the beginning of many textbooks and syllabi in applied or professional ethics is a unit on philosophical moral theories (such as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics). However, teaching such theories is of questionable value in this context. This article introduces the moral vocabulary approach. Instead of burdening students with complex ethical theories, they are introduced to the logic of elementary moral concepts. This avoids many of the drawbacks of teaching ethical theories, while preserving the benefit of equipping students with the conceptual tools they need to critically analyse ethical issues.

This article draws on authors’ experiences as fat-bodied white women philosophers, empirical research about fat discrimination, and common teaching topics and practices to reflect on fat stigma in dominant forms of teaching philosophy. We situate our critique in fat studies literature, locating the “normal professor body” within eugenic social and political movements, and the transatlantic slave trade. We outline how fat stigma specifically applies to historical and contemporary forms of Western canonical teaching practices and materials. Many of the topics philosophers teach on practical rationality evoke stereotypes about fat-bodied people as bad eaters, and activate stereotype threat for fat philosophers, thus affecting performance and credibility. We offer the case of “fat man” hypotheticals in contemporary analytic ethics as cases of perpetuating stigma, thereby undermining their pedagogical efficacy. We conclude by offering recommendations for teaching in ways that mitigate the influence of fat stigmatizing stereotypes and stereotype threat for fat philosophers.

While discussion is a hallmark of philosophy teaching methods, some instructors express doubt as to the possibilities for its meaningful implementation in online classes. Here, I report on a routine that utilized synchronous and asynchronous discussion strategies to promote community-building and critical engagement in an educational philosophy class forced online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Before class, students used social annotation software to collaboratively read a text. During class, we pursued whole-group discussion using student-centered strategies before breaking into partners for small-group work on a written discussion prompt. After class, students individually replied to the prompts written by these small groups. Results show that students found that this routinized structure promoted engagement with the course content and each other, ultimately building a community that supported critical thinking in the virtual classroom. Implications are raised regarding instructor workload and control over course outcomes.

Tragedy feels disempowering and the confluence of tragedies since the beginning of 2020 can overwhelm one’s sense of agency. This paper describes how we use a civic engagement (CE) project to nurture radical hope for our students. Radical hope involves a desire for a positive outcome surpassing understanding, as well as an activity to strive to achieve that outcome despite its uncertainty. Our CE project asks students to identify ethical issues they care about and respond in a fitting way, questioning the assumption that their efforts do not matter, and imagining creative ways to make a difference that are in their power. We scaffold our CE project in order to nurture hopeful possibilities for students by offering real-world, feasible pathways for addressing systemic problems.

Designing a successful graduate seminar should account for more than just the content to be conveyed and the completion of the standard seminar paper. This article dissects the seminar structure, revealing some of what is obscured by the “hidden curriculum” of graduate education, with an eye toward transforming the climate in philosophy. I begin with a brief review of literature on graduate teaching and inclusive teaching in philosophy. I then examine four components of a typical graduate seminar: the faculty instructor of graduate courses, the graduate students themselves, the material selection, and the course requirements. Reflecting on the graduate seminar compels revisiting learning goals, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility, and adopting a more intentional approach to graduate course design that ties course goals to specific activities and assessments for the life of the professional philosopher.

Despite their difficulty, the writings of Aristotle can be effectively used in an introductory course. This does not mean that students should be assigned whole books, or even chapters. Instead, their readings should consist of individual paragraphs. To justify this procedure, the paper draws on the work of Reviel Netz, who has argued that the “basic discourse unit” in Aristotle’s writings is precisely the “paragraph.” With this term he does not refer to the feature of modern writing signalled by indentation, for that did not exist in antiquity. Instead, he means a short, logically self-contained segment, discernible through specific linguistic markers. To illustrate how a close reading of an Aristotelian “paragraph” can be pedagogically fruitful, this paper offers a case study: the opening lines of the Metaphysics (980a20–27), in which Aristotle argues that “all human beings by nature desire to know.”

This article is about teaching probability to students of philosophy who don’t aim to do primarily formal work in their research. These students are unlikely to seek out classes about probability or formal epistemology for various reasons, for example because they don’t realize that this knowledge would be useful for them or because they are intimidated by the material. However, most areas of philosophy now contain debates that incorporate probability, and basic knowledge of it is essential even for philosophers whose work isn’t primarily formal. In this article, I explain how to teach probability to students who are not already enthusiastic about formal philosophy, taking into account the common phenomena of math anxiety and the lack of reading skills for formal texts. I address course design, lesson design, and assignment design. Most of my recommendations also apply to teaching formal methods other than probability theory.

It is no secret that we, as a society, struggle to have productive conversations about race and gender. Discussions about these issues are beset with obstacles, from the inherent power dynamics between conversation partners to the fear that participants feel about saying something harmful. One practice that can help address these difficulties is intergroup dialogue—sustained, small group discussions with participants from a variety of social identities. In this paper, we detail how we incorporated intergroup dialogue into a 120-student “Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” course, providing a blueprint for anyone who wants to help their students develop the ability to take part in fruitful conversations surrounding these challenging topics. We provide strategies for how to design intergroup dialogues to avoid many of the common pitfalls of such conversations, strategies that ultimately helped our students become more likely to initiate and participate in worthwhile discussions on race and gender. We expect our experiences to be especially helpful for instructors of large courses, where making time for small group dialogue is quite challenging, but many of the practices we used can also be adapted for smaller scale courses as well.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility.

This paper describes an application of mastery learning to the teaching of philosophical writing—an approach I call “the Levels System.” In this paper, I explain the Levels System, how I integrate it into my course, and the pedagogical research supporting the principles of mastery learning on which it is built. I also compare the Levels System to Maryellen Weimer’s “menu approach,” Linda Nilson’s “specifications grading,” and Fred Keller’s “personalized system of instruction.” I argue that the Levels System has many of the virtues of these other systems and some additional virtues of its own.

I argue that campus closures and shifts to online instruction in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic created an obligation to offer courses asynchronously. This is because some students could not have reasonably foreseen circumstances making continued synchronous participation impossible. Offering synchronous participation options to students who could continue to participate thusly would have been unfair to students who could not participate synchronously. I also discuss why ex post facto consideration of this decision is warranted, noting that similar actions may be necessary in the future and that other tough pedagogical cases share important similarities with this case.

Academic internships are increasingly common in other disciplines, but have not been discussed or implemented widely in the discipline of philosophy. This article fills this gap by discussing the potential benefits of philosophy internships and addressing two important questions: whether there is something different about philosophy—possibly its abstractness, versatility, or what I refer to as “pluripotency”—that renders the benefits of internships out of reach for many philosophy students, and whether philosophy faculty should be responsible for developing and implementing philosophy internships. In this article, I argue that there is nothing about the discipline itself that prevents philosophy majors from experiencing the benefits of academic internships and that, among the different possible internship coordinators, philosophy faculty bear primary responsibility for developing academic internships in philosophy and assisting philosophy students as they transition from college to professional career.

I argue that colleges should include philosophy courses as general-education requirements. I begin by explaining the prima facie case against general-education requirements and the need for philosophers to defend their courses’ place in the general-education curriculum. Next, I present two arguments for philosophy as a general-education requirement. The first is the Argument from Content: that philosophy courses’ content tends to match the intended nature and purposes of general-education courses. The second is the Argument from Outcomes: that even if philosophy courses didn’t match the intended purposes of general-education courses, they would still be appropriate as general-education requirements, because there is empirical evidence that philosophy courses produce valuable skills and knowledge in students.

Here I describe a game that I use in my logic classes once we begin derivations. The game can help improve class dynamics, help struggling students recognizes they are not alone, open lines of communication between students, and help students of all levels prepare for exams. The game can provide struggling students with more practice with the fundamental rules of a logical system while also challenging students who excel at derivations. If students are struggling with particular rules or strategies in the system, the game can be tailored to address them. I explain how the game has evolved since I started using it, highlighting the pedagogical benefits of the changes I have made, and (in the appendix) I provide examples of the handouts I distribute and a “checklist” to use before, during, and after the game.

Many students struggle to enter moral debates in a productive way because they automatically think of moral claims as ‘just opinions’ and not something one could productively argue about. Underlying this response are various versions of a muddled distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘opinions.’ This paper outlines a way to help students overcome their use of this distinction, thereby clearing an obstacle to true moral debate. It explains why the fact-opinion distinction should simply be scrapped, rather than merely sharpened. It then proposes a different distinction well suited to replace it. Finally, it outlines an activity which can be used to teach the new distinction, as well as a number of benefits to attempting the whole replacement process.

This article traces my own pedagogical journey to find strategies for teaching critical thinking that emphasize intellectual cooperation, empathy, and argument repair, a journey that found me frequently turning to sources outside of philosophy, including work in intergroup dialogue and pedagogical work in rhetoric and composition. Theoretically, the article showcases Maureen Linker’s notion of ‘cooperative reasoning’ (2015), sets it against the ‘adversary paradigm’ Janice Moulton critiques, and illustrates how Peter Elbow’s challenges to critical thinking as a ‘doubting game’ resonate with Linker’s work. Practically, it illustrates the structure and the role of peer-to-peer dialogues in my own reasoning classroom, an enactment of a cooperative, belief-based approach to reasoning inspired by Linker and Elbow alike, while also learning from the methodologies of intergroup dialogue.

How can we use what cognitive science has taught us about perception to improve the critical thinking skills of our students? What, for instance, does it tell us about subjects who think they’ve seen Bigfoot, ghosts, and other “weird things”? I explore two approaches for giving students some empirically based tools for examining cases like these. The first, which I call the “we see what we want to see” approach, focuses the idea that beliefs and desires can shape our visual experiences. This approach, however, encourages students to view subjects who report weird experiences as being cognitively irresponsible and worthy of derision. The second approach, which I call the “we see what our evolutionary ancestors needed to see” approach, asserts these experiences are the result of evolutionarily designed perceptual mechanisms that specialize in representing human-like qualities. Fortunately, the second approach does not create the same problematic attitude in students as the first.

Medical ethics is normally taught in a combination of three ways: through discussions of normative theories and principles; through for-and-against debating of topics; or through case studies (narrative ethics). I want to argue that a fourth approach might be better, and should be used more: teaching medical ethics through medical law. Medical law is already deeply imbued with ethical concepts, principles and reasons, and allows the discussion of ethics through the “back door,” as it were. The two greatest advantages of the law are (i) its familiar authority, especially among the disengaged medical students who have little interest or respect for the subject of ethics; and (ii) its focus on the reality of the people and the tragedies discussed (as opposed to the abstractness of a lot of ethical discussion). Finally, I argue that medical law, unlike ethics, allows more efficient and more detailed MCQ assessment.

The distinction between weak and strong forms of critical thinking is a hallmark of Richard Paul’s pedagogy. He maintains that good reasoning entails a personal commitment to fair-mindedness. In this brief essay, I argue that Paul’s conception of fair-mindedness conflates cognitive empathy with empathetic concern and altruism. One’s understanding another’s perspective by no means entails approving of it, and one may seek to better grasp this standpoint for purely selfish reasons. Depending upon the circumstances, the other could be one’s competitor, enemy, mark, or even intended victim. This implies that while we may wish that the world were otherwise, even very bad people can be highly effective critical thinkers.

This paper describes an approach to teaching the philosophy of science to science students that was developed in a context where the course is a lower-level requirement for all natural science majors. This audience made it appropriate to reconsider standard approaches to the field and resulted in an innovative pedagogical strategy subsequently used, in modified form, in more traditional philosophical contexts. This paper describes the pedagogical approach, explains reasons for it, motivates more specific ways of enacting it, and assess its value, not only for science students, but for philosophy majors as well.

Points-based grading, though now traditional, faces powerful critiques: Such grading creates a low road to passing, it undermines motivation, it wastes time, and it causes stress. It creates an illusion of mathematical precision. It is unfriendly to necessary conditions for satisfactory performance. This paper defends the alternative of specifications grading. Specifications grading grades only on whether work meets a set of expectations for satisfactory performance, with the expectations set at a high but reachable level. With a high bar also comes opportunities to revise unsatisfactory work. I summarize arguments from the literature in support of the system, but I also give account of my two-year experiment in philosophy courses with specifications grading. Compared with points-based grading, specifications grading appears to motivate students better and helps them learn more. I consider objections from both traditionalists and so-called ‘ungraders.’ The former hope to secure the benefits of specifications grading while still keeping points. The latter favor eliminating grading altogether.

In this article, I present a philosophy-of-language assignment which emerges as the hero in a fable with the following trio of villains: Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom. Building on Penny Weiss’s “Making History of Ideas Classes Relevant” (Teaching Philosophy 25[2] [June 2002]: 123–30; https://doi.org/10.5840/teachphil200225225), and serving students taking an introductory course which covers (at least) Western theories of meaning, the “You are there” essay conquers Abstractness by requiring students to make a connection between the material and their lives, rendering theories relevant. It conquers Parroting by requiring them to apply theories to new examples. And it conquers Boredom by producing papers whose originality can not only surprise but also remind the instructor reading them how meaningful the original theories are. In addition, I present a way to adapt the Weiss framework such that it’s (more) inclusive, and discuss my experience piloting and negotiating the assignment. As appendices, I include materials which an instructor can use to scaffold the assignment. Note that beyond dispatching Abstractness, Parroting, and Boredom, the assignment invites collaborative/cooperative learning, fosters learner autonomy, and lends itself to online course delivery.

In this paper, I argue that there are significant instances of educational injustice in the context of philosophy teaching that can be effectively reduced by an increased implementation of digital technologies. More specifically, I show that there are good reasons to believe that testimonial injustices constitute serious instances of educational injustice that will frequently occur in philosophy classes. Using digital tools to anonymize student contributions opens up a promising way of dealing with these injustices. If convincing, my arguments give reason to perceive epistemic injustices in educational settings as a serious threat to educational justice and to reconsider the implications of increased digitalization for issues of educational justice.

This article attempts to contribute to the literature on what has become known as “student relativism” by suggesting that in many cases it is a symptom of a broader and equally problematic pre-reflective epistemological framework that students often bring with them to the study of philosophy. It goes on to describe the notion of a “dialectical fact,” and to propose that this concept can be a useful pedagogical tool for helping students to progress beyond that framework.