Teaching Philosophy

The paper describes two practical exercises (and their learning outcomes) requiring students to consider certain concrete decisions made by managers in business and professional life. The first exercise requires students to consider that competitive economic exchange inevitably puts managers in situations where they cannot accurately predict the outcomes of their decisions, and often results in harm to innocent people. In this practical exercise, seven discussion situations are described and students are asked to make decisions that take into account the individuals affected by these managerial decisions. Students are asked to consider various ethical theories and devise creative solutions so as to avoid unnecessary harm. The second exercise places students in roles that represent shareholders and stakeholders and asks them to consider the relocation of a manufacturing company to their community.

Drawing upon Aristotle’s understanding of phronesis, this paper argues for the importance of listening to older people who have practical wisdom. The paper begins by responding to the objection that practical wisdom is not age-related, arguing that while advanced age is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for having practical wisdom, there is a correlation between the two. Next, the paper turns to the relevance of practical wisdom in the philosophy classroom, specifically with whether wisdom can be taught, and, if it can be taught, what is the best method for teaching it. After concluding that practical wisdom is age-related, something cultivated over a lifetime, and something that is possible to develop in the classroom, the paper describes an assignment where students engage a phronimos (a person of advanced age whom students consider has a high level of practical wisdom).

This paper describes a method and a practical exercise that offers students a glimpse of everyday enlightenment by using Socrates’ technique of questioning, Plato’s account of the ascent to the form of the good, along with an aspect of Buddha’s Eight Fold Path. The practical exercise prompts students to consider the form of honesty by considering what honesty is for them. The exercise then proceeds to a discussion of how they know they are honest and what rules one must follow to be honest. With this initial account of honesty, the paper then details a set of “proto-philosophical questions” that challenges the student to further articulate their account of honesty, to compare it to dishonesty, and to contextualize it by imagining themselves as the victim of deception or as a deceiver.

This paper describes two collaborative projects that illustrate the value of learning symbolic logic and provide students (and instructors) a break from the routine work of learning new symbols or proof techniques. The first project has students work together to reconstruct the argument in Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. This project has the benefit of showing students that what they are reading in college has an underlying logical structure and that their knowledge of conditionals, conjunctions, etc. functions in real, argumentative discourse. The second project introduces students to four key concepts: self-reference, paradox, and metatheory, and then exposes them to key metatheoretic concepts (consistency and completeness) and to Gödel’s incompleteness proof.