Teaching Philosophy

I’ve been digging through iTunesU for Philosophy material (we’re preparing to develop content for next year) and I found a whole set of lectures from Hubert Dreyfus’s at UC Berkeley. I can’t figure out how to post a link, but here’s how you can find it:

Go to the iTunes Store. Click on ‘iTunesU’, which is usually at the bottom of the list a box on the upper left. Scroll down to UC Berkeley, Click on ‘Arts & Humanities’ under ‘Courses’ (the second box down from the top) and you should see his courses.

McDaniel is, starting in ‘09-’10, requiring a 3rd year ‘writing in the discipline’ course for all majors. In preparation for this course, I’ve been collecting a list of words and/or phrases with philosophic implications of which most undergraduates are unaware. For example, many undergrads use ‘conclude’ as a synonym for ’summarize’, and ‘assert’ as a replacement for ’state’. I’m particularly interested in highlighting those with logical implications that are unknown to our students.

Another example that I can’t resist: a colleague of mine recently had a student who consistently used the phrase ‘due to’ in an odd way. When pressed, the student explained that her high school English teacher had told her never to use the word ‘because’ in formal prose. So whenever she wrote a paper, she wrote ‘because’ and then did a search and replace to change it to ‘due to’. The fact that she had made it to her 3rd or 4th year of college without correction staggers the imagination.

Here’s my initial list. Any suggestions or additions would be helpful.

Assert
Assume
Conclude
Necessary
Sufficient
Imply
Entail
Valid
Belief
Opinion (as in “Do I have to use sources in this paper, or do you just want my opinion”)
Infer
Conclude

Any more?

The unexamined life is not living, but is the unexamined course worth giving? Is there any value in giving in-class blue book exams in philosophy? Let’s exclude logic and critical thinking, what is the advantage to timed exams?

I give exams, but I’ve gotten away from in-class and gone completely over to take homes because it allows students the space to work out insights, to be able to quote and cite works they are engaging, and to print out the paper in a font that is much easier on the eyes than their hand-scrawled chicken scratch. The exercise seems a better facsimile of the philosophical process, although it does keep me from being able to ask straight forward knowledge recall questions like you get with matching, short answer, or fill in the blanks. But, let’s be honest, in a week’s time that short term info is gone anyway and it can be asked for creatively in a well-worded essay question.

So, is there value in a timed in-class philosophy exam? Is there a reason for the blue book blues?

I’m trying to put together a grant to support the development of a system to collect, archive, and analyze examples for use in CT instruction across the curriculum. And I’m looking for both comments & collaborators. Here’s the 100 word summary:

Critical Thinking is central to a liberal education, but is rarely the subject of direct instruction. Integrating direct instruction in CT into courses across the curriculum requires significant collaboration amongst faculty from many disciplinary backgrounds. The grantee will work with local faculty and nationally recognized experts in CT to collect, digitize, archive, and analyze ‘teachable moment’ examples of informal reasoning into an open, web-based database, which then can be used to support direct CT instruction across the curriculum. Such a system will not only improve ours’ students CT skills; but ultimately students around the nation and world as well.

And here’s the abstract:

While Critical Thinking (CT) can be taught in any academic domain, it rarely receives sustained and direct attention outside Philosophy. Research has shown that stand-alone generalized courses in CT that are offered by many Philosophy Departments are less effective at cultivating CT skills than integrating small amounts of direct instruction into a multiplicity of academic contexts (Hatcher, 2006). This integrated approach poses its own challenges: there are few forums for discussing CT across the curriculum, and none for sharing examples of CT in action across the disciplines.

The grantee will work with local faculty as well as nationally recognized experts in CT to collect, digitize, archive, and analyze ‘teachable moment’ examples of informal reasoning that are currently in use in our classrooms, regardless of medium or intellectual domain. The faculty members who collect the examples will provide expository and critical prose, which will be subjected to peer review, to create ‘modules’ that will support direct instruction in CT in any context. The resultant modules will be presented to the students via the web, along with standard ‘web-2.0’ functionality that allows for student feedback, commentary, rating systems, saving to a ‘portfolio,’ and social networking. They can also be printed as ‘thin’ textbooks to support direct instruction of CT. Faculty at other institutions will ultimately be invited to participate, not just as users but as contributors.

By facilitating collaboration amongst faculty across the liberal arts, such a system will improve ours students’ CT skills, which is core to our mission. The materials developed, as well as the process of collaboration that underlies the integration of direct instruction across the disciplines, will be shared with our peer institutions initially, and ultimately nationally. In the end, this open, web-based CT instructional material will enhance CT teaching across any institutional or state lines.

I’m interested in any comments you might have. And, if you’re interesting in collaborating (pending the grant’s approval, of course), there are many ways to do so. We’ll be looking for philosophers to:

• submit materials (i.e. the fallacious letter to the editor in your local paper),
• write an analysis of an example we already have,
• act as a peer reviewer for the content as it is developed,
• act as ‘editors’ for sections of the database (i.e. ‘fallacies of relevance’, ’scientific reasoning: observation studies’, etc.)

There’s a good article in the NYTimes on research by Lera Boroditsky and colleagues on the influence of language categories on perception. If you were there, I’m sure you’d remember her presentation at the SPP in Edmonton. I think every person in the room had their hand up for a question. I’ve never seen anything like it. Anyway - I, like many of the people there, believe her research to be solid and interesting, but worry about the conclusion drawn. I won’t bias your reading, however: When Language Can Hold the Answer

I have a student writing a paper on this, and it behooves me to understand what he is talking about.

According to Catholic orthodoxy, God consists of three different Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  How can that be?  Are they the same thing or three different things? 

If they are the same thing, then they have the same properties (by the indiscernibility of identicals).  But based on what the Bible says, they seem to have different properties.  For instance, sometimes the Son speaks to the Father, which suggests that they are doing different things at different times.  If they have different properties, then they are different things (by the contrapositive of the indiscernibility of identicals).  But this conclusion is polytheistic heresy from a Catholic standpoint.

Is there any other way out of this?  Perhaps they partially overlap: they have a common part (a unique divine essence?) but they also have distinct parts (e.g., the Son has his mortal incarnation as a part unique to him). Then we could say that they are “the same God” in the sense of sharing the same divine essence as a common part, but “different Persons” in the sense that they also have their own different parts with different properties.  At the moment, this is the only solution that makes sense to me.

Would this solution be remotely acceptable to the Catholic Church?  Does anyone know what the Church’s official view on this is?  What about other Christian denominations?

The last set of flash-based argument demos were designed to demonstrate validity as a function of form. These are meant to prove validity via truth-tables.

First, click ’start’ to transfer the truth and false values over to the P and Q in ‘P v Q’. Then complete the truth-table via the combo box, and click ‘check’:

Basic Truth-Table Static Link (Right /Ctrl click to ‘Save Target/File As…’ to download).

In this one, the user can check off all those lines in which the conclusion is true, and check to see if the remaining line have any false premises:

Hypothetical Syllogism Truth-Table Static Link (Right /Ctrl click to ‘Save Target/File As…’ to download).

I also have Conditional (which can be used for MP) and Disjunction. Purpose-built demos for MP, MT and DS1&2 are on their way.

The NY Times has an article on the increased enrollments in Philosophy around the nation in the past few years. I’ve always believed that Republican administrations breed philosophy students, but I have little actual data to support that.

In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined

Be sure to read the entire article, as the last line is, perhaps, the most important, at least to some subset of my male students!

A year or so ago, I put these little things together in flash to demonstrate validity of argument as a function of form. Put anything in the top two boxes and press ‘Start’ to complete the argument. Feel free to use them as you see fit. As always, academic credit would be appreciated.

Modus Ponens Static Link (Right /Ctrl click to ‘Save Target/File As…’ to download.

Modus Tollens Static Link (Right /Ctrl click to ‘Save Target/File As…’ to download.

Affirming the Consequent Static Link (Right /Ctrl click to ‘Save Target/File As…’ to download.

Denying the Antecedent Static Link (Right /Ctrl click to ‘Save Target/File As…’ to download.

I also have Disjunctive Syllogism 1 and Disjunctive Syllogism 2, as well as Hypothetical Syllogism.

These are really easy to make, so if there are any special requests, I can throw them together quickly. At some point, I’m planning on making similarly animated versions with P’s and Q’s that can be strung together to produce derivations - but that is a project for a summer. With a grant.

I’ve captured this for use on my own site. It is also available at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M70emIFxETs:

Hillary 08: Red Phone Static Link

In a twist, the actress who plays the sleeping 8-year old made headlines by ‘coming out’ as a Obama supporter - that is wholly uninteresting in itself, but it is worth pointing out that she criticizes the ad as an appeal to fear: Girl seen in Clinton’s ‘3 a.m.’ ad supports Obama