The author reports on an effort to transform traditional top-down, instructor-centered philosophy courses into courses that are open, learning-centered, and work toward a cooperative goal. After providing the underlying rationale for cooperative philosophy courses, the author describes a cooperative philosophy course where students were assigned with individually (and cooperatively) answering the question “What is Philosophy?” by creating introductory philosophy textbooks. The author provides details on how to guide students to the creation of such introductory textbooks with a variety of practical classroom exercises and suggestions for assessment. Finally, potential future applications for cooperative learning courses are discussed.

The author describes a peripatetic course aiming at undermining ethnocentric biases that are at the root of certain failures of miscommunication. The course involves a description of two semiotic models (the Saussarian and Peircean) and their application to cases of communication involving radical cultural difference, specifically the interpretive efforts of both conquering Spaniards and conquered Native Americans. Since the Peircean semiotic model requires a contextual-understanding of the Other in order for successful communication, the author contends that it is necessary for philosophy courses to be both historically oriented and provide greater global awareness. To this end, the author gives an account of a philosophy course involving ten American liberal arts students who retrace the route of Spanish conquistadors form Veracruz to Mexico City and that of Dominican missionaries from Oaxaca to Chiapas.

A guiding thread in Western thought is that the world has a mathematical structure. This essay articulates this thread by making use of a cardboard teaching aid that illustrates the Pythagorean Theorem and uses this teaching aid as a starting point for discussion about a variety of philosophical and historical topics. To name just a few, the aid can be used to segue into a discussion of the Pythagorean association of shapes with numbers, the nature of deductive argumentation, the demonstration of part of the Theorem in the Meno, the possible origin of the Theorem in Egypt, the influence of Pythagoreans upon Plato, or even the relation of the Pythagorean Theorem to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Many undergraduates, philosophy majors included, read philosophical texts similar to the way they read stories. One method for teaching students how to discern the argumentative structure of a philosophy text is through argument diagrams (text boxes used to represent claims with arrows and lines used to represent connections between these claims). This paper provides criteria for an ideal argument diagramming software and then reviews the strengths and weaknesses of such software currently available, e.g. Araucaria, Argutect, Athena Standard, Inspiration, and Reason!Able.

In contrast to traditional content management systems (CMS), TikiWiki (or Tiki for short) is a CMS that not only includes discussion forums, messaging, webmail, chat, file and image galleries, blogs, etc. but also Wikis (an online user-created encyclopedia). Two benefits of using Tiki are that it provides an integrated place where course content like syllabi and handouts can be accessed but also chat and discussion forum functionalities allow for better instructor-student or student-student collaboration. Whereas the former saves departments money with respect to printing, the latter is a practical use of technology in distance learning courses. The author outlines his use of Tiki to teach a distance learning logic course at three to six Kent State campuses as well as offers suggestions (and some cautionary remarks) for how to use Tiki in upper-level seminars in the philosophy. Finally, technical, legal, and pedagogical issues in the use of Tiki like information security and student privacy are discussed.

Biological scientists are increasingly encountering work-related ethical problems. For most, their training leaves them quite unprepared. Rather than merely providing additional bolt-on courses in ethics, a way of introducing critical thinking skills seamlessly into the curriculum is proposed. A method is described whereby students become engaged in self-generated discussion about the scientifically recognized, but philosophically complex, terms ‘disease’ and ‘health.’ Addressing these words, students are confrontedwith the need to develop critical thinking skills without realizing that they are entering into overt philosophical argument—the like of which many often prejudge to be abstract and worthless.