Teaching

Virtue Dialogue in Teaching

Introduction to Philosophy

Since my research focuses on metaphilosophy, education, and virtue, it's perhaps unsurprising that my research and teaching greatly inform one another. My Introduction to Philosophy course is a direct application of my Virtue Dialogue theory. Virtue dialogue theory provides concrete language and conceptual grounding to help students see the value and importance of education in general as well as philosophy in particular: in terms of helping develop ethical, critical thinkers. This can be a tool to motivate students to engage with course content, encourage students for doing well using precise virtue-language, and give specific feedback on ways for students to improve in their interactions with. It also helps to answer the common question that students often take to be rhetorical when they do not see the value of what they are learning: “when are we ever going to use this in life?”--after all, what could be more practical in a greater variety of contexts than developing habits conducive to having good dialogues? 

Teaching philosophy in terms of virtuous dialogue is fundamentally a matter of framing. Often, philosophers think of teaching as different in kind from "actually doing" philosophy, wherein "doing philosophy" only occurs at high levels of technicality and expertise. This means that doing philosophy is restricted to researching, writing, and engaging with fellow scholars, and that teaching philosophy is a fundamentally different (and often less-valued, seen only as a means-to-an-end) practice. However, since a good dialogue can occur between anyone regardless of their level of expertise (so long as those involved are not engaging viciously), the instructor should think of teaching philosophy as doing philosophy. Seeing teaching as another form of doing philosophy is important for myriad reasons, but one of the most salient is that doing so explicitly frames philosophy as a more inclusive, welcoming practice. If we want students to see the value of philosophy, it's not obvious how we can adequately demonstrate that while also communicating that they cannot actually do philosophy until they develop high levels of expertise and that philosophy only occurs in the exclusive academic sphere. Instead, by conceiving of and communicating philosophy as a practice of virtuous dialogue, we can much more easily show students the value of philosophy because philosophy can, and does, happen in all sorts of spaces. 

In practice, framing a philosophy course in terms of virtuous dialogue entails a few key components. The first is to begin the class with a discussion of what philosophy is--soliciting what students think about philosophy and who they think of as a "Philosopher." Encouraging students to reflect on the nature of philosophy implicitly opens the class through dialogue. After some discussion of students' ideas about it, I ask them what makes for a good dialogue--writing the question and students' suggestions on the board as they offer them. When I did this with my fall 2022 class, the first two suggestions were "Understanding" and "Civility." I then offered some examples in terms of intellectual and moral virtue language to further facilitate the discussion, fleshing out how virtues like open-mindedness, humility, honesty, empathy, interpretative charity, self-reflection, carefulness, and so on, seem to be elements required (or at least conducive to) good dialogue. Having explored the characteristics of a good dialogue, the students are now in a position to consider doing philosophy well in terms of engaging in virtuous dialogue--something which this philosophy course aims to facilitate.

Much like a good dialogue, then, the structure of the course should also have a cohesive narrative that intentionally connects from one topic to the next. This means that rather than organizing a course in terms of, for example, a series of discrete units--first logic, then epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, etc.--or chronologically through philosophy's "Greatest Hits," there should be a developmental trajectory that transitions from, and builds towards, each successive topic or area, just like one might transition through different topics in a conversation. One of the main problems with the discrete units and Greatest Hits approaches is that, especially for students without a background in philosophy, it's far from obvious at any point why the classes is talking about a particular thing at any given time; students just have to take the instructors' word for it that these topics/philosophers should be studied and many students will not see how ideas relate to one another. 

Examples & Explanations of Narratively Framing an Introductory Philosophy Course

In contrast, the narrative framing can still likely go through the same content, but the transitions and connections are more explicit for students to see. From my introductory class, then, we discuss Stairs' piece "Some People are More Entitled to their Opinions than Others" to set the stage for some introductory logic and philosophical methodology. From there, we move on to Augustine and Thagard on astrology and pseudoscience as a first engagement with a primary text and conceptual analysis in philosophy of science, respectively. These discussions about logical problems with astrology lead to a (fairly traditional) section on epistemology and disagreement, which allows us to apply concepts like justification, truth, knowledge, and reasonable disagreement to the arguments surrounding astrology. From here, students may be wondering why epistemology matters, given that e.g., believing in astrology and generally having unjustified or false beliefs is probably harmless. This is why the epistemology section is immediately followed by Clifford's "Ethics of Belief" and a section on the philosophy of conspiracy theories. It's at this point, too, that some of the internalism/externalism debates in epistemology and issues with epistemic luck become more salient for the students as well, since epistemic, moral, and causal responsibility are deeply interrelated in the ethics of belief and conspiracy theories literature. Tethering morality to an individual's epistemic state brings us back to a specific discussion of intellectual humility, where I have students read the first half of Whitcomb et al.'s fantastic paper on the subject. In it, the authors ultimately defend an account of intellectual humility in terms of "owning one's intellectual limitations." This understanding of intellectual humility therefore brings students back to considerations about justification, but also leads them to reflect on themselves as individuals. As such, the intellectual humility portion of the course serves as a transition from the ethics of belief to questions about identity. We read Locke's "Of Identity and Diversity" to explore personal identity and persistence through time. Considering Locke's ultimate answer is in terms of persistence of consciousness, this leads to the philosophy of mind section of the class. This is a pretty typical section (dualism, interaction problem, varieties of physicalism, etc.), except that it ends with Aristotle's "Human Function" argument from Nicomachean Ethics as a transition from considerations about the mind to a section on metaethics, relativism, and consequentialism (á la Richard Fumerton's framing in Reason and Morality). This ethics section then leads to the concluding "section" of the course, which is on happiness. We transition from consequentialism to hedonism, the Paradox of Hedonism, desire-satisfaction theory, and then, finally, virtue theory. We return to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to explore virtue theory, including excerpts on friendship supplemented with Shannon Vallor's "Flourishing on Facebook" for contemporary connections between Aristotle's theory of friendship to social media. The course closes with discussion of virtue friendship and Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, where we ultimately return to reflect on the role of philosophy in living well, connecting the semester's virtue-dialogue framework to his ideas about virtue friendship and eudaimonia. 

Examples & Explanations of Virtue-Dialogue Assignments 

In addition to overall framing for the course, it's important to design and motivate individual assignments in terms of virtues as well. Because we had discussed the virtue dialogue framing for doing philosophy, I use the virtue-language for motivating and articulating the good habits that the class assignments are intended to practice. Because we want to be capable of engaging in good dialogues not only with people who communicate in the same ways we do, but with those who have different backgrounds, beliefs, and values, the virtue dialogue framing is particularly conducive to showing students the value in reading and really working hard to understand different philosophical ideas; the value is not grounded in providing the “right answer,” but in practicing understanding other’s ideas for the sake of better understanding other points-of-view and to develop the corresponding virtues conducive to engaging in good dialogues. 

So what does this look like in practice? As mentioned, throughout the semester, I introduced students to various philosophers, such as John Locke, Augustine, and Aristotle. In order to best support students’ development of good habits for understanding, instead of an exam or summary of each of these philosophers' ideas, over the course of the semester I had students do a line-by-line close-reading of an argument from each. This close-reading required that they rewrite each line of the argument to the best of their understanding (developing interpretative charity), identify any ambiguities in the sentence such as “it”, “this”, “that” (practicing attentiveness to detail and carefulness), explain how the ideas expressed in this sentence relate to the sentences before and after it (practicing thoroughness), identify any relevant, unstated assumptions required to make sense of the passage (developing perceptiveness), ask clarification questions when they were uncertain about something (encouraging intellectual humility and self-awareness), define key terms in the passage by explicitly quoting their definitions from elsewhere in the text and then rewriting them as best as they understand them (encouraging consistency in interpretation), and so on. Having completed the close-reading of the text, students were to reconstruct the overarching argument in their own words, doing their best to accurately and charitably represent the philosopher's overall argument. By breaking down the assignment into more specific instructions for reading the text, students had more guidance regarding the specific practices that go into thinking carefully and engaging well with another person’s ideas. Additionally, this assignment is very intentionally only interpretative rather than evaluative; this is to emphasize the importance of developing the skills to understand a position separately from, and prior to, articulating agreement/disagreement with the view. Because the assignment was specifically grounded within a larger context of learning how to engage in good dialogues, students saw the value of the assignment as applicable beyond the immediate content or class. 

The first iteration of this Close-Reading Assignment was using Augustine's arguments against astrology, since each argument has its own paragraph and (for the most-part) can be analyzed out-of-context. I created groups of 3-4, assigning each group one argument. Each student was to complete the Close-Reading on their own (and submit it on Canvas for accountability's sake) before coming to class and comparing with the others who had completed the assignment on the same argument. Each group was to identify the ways in which each person's Close-Reading of the text differed, before discussing how the variations impact reading the overall argument. My aims in this comparative activity are that students (1) recognize the importance of slowing down, carefulness, and sensitivity to detail for understanding philosophy, (2) practice philosophically engaging with their peers in a pretty low-stakes context, considering interpretative disagreements are generally far less impassioned and vulnerable to adversariality than other kinds of disagreements, (3) begin to recognize their own assumptions that impact how they approach philosophy through seeing what they had taken for granted in their interpretations, which hopefully leads to greater open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, self-reflection, and intellectual humility, and (4) provide an opportunity to get feedback on their assignment from their peers before I actually grade it, since after this activity I give them a few days to revise and resubmit the assignment. Having spent the first half of the class-period doing this comparative activity, the students switched groups so that each new group of three or four students represented three or four different arguments. Each person was then to read aloud their respective passage before--in their own words--explaining the argument to the others in the group who had not read it as closely. Again, having already spent time working through the argument both on their own and with others, each student should be something of an expert on their argument; explaining their argument to others who did not work as closely with the argument is therefore an opportunity to practice communicating complex philosophical ideas to a few peers. 

The second iteration was on Locke's "Of Identity and Diversity." There were a few changes from the first Close-Reading. The first change is that students were able to choose which passage in Locke they wanted to do a close-reading of from a handful of options that I had selected. This way, students could select an argument that they found most interesting or challenging. The second change was that, because Locke is very intentional in defining terms, the students were expected to specifically identify, quote, and explain each key term used in their passage before doing the line-by-line interpretative work. For many, this required going back to previous sections to find where Locke defines the term. Given Locke's technical uses of otherwise ordinary terms, understanding how Locke uses these terms is crucial for actually understanding his arguments--students' preconceived notions about "person," "identity," etc., are almost guaranteed going to lead them astray otherwise. Defining terms early on is a common feature of many analytic philosophy papers, so this introduces students to this convention (which comes up in other papers we read throughout the term). directs students towards the importance of how someone uses a word for understanding their position more broadly, and begins to establish how students should approach their own philosophical writing--beginning by defining terms. The third change was that students did not have an explicit, in-class opportunity to discuss their passage with their classmates; the Close-Reading that they submitted would be the one that I commented on and graded.

The third Close-Reading assignment was on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Continuing the trend of expanding choices, students were able to choose from any passage we read in-class as the subject of their Close-Reading. Otherwise, there were two additional changes from the Locke Close-Reading: annotation and translator's notes. Before doing the line-by-line work, students were to annotate the passage itself identifying the following (if applicable): (1) keywords & their corresponding definitions; (2) statements Aristotle is defending; (3) statements attributed to others / Aristotle is disagreeing with; (4) reasons/evidence supporting a statement; (5) examples; (6) questions. I offered a color-coding system, but they were welcome to explore their own styles of annotation so long as there was a way for me to clearly see that they had identified (1)-(6). The purpose of this is to turn students' attention to the "patterns" in Aristotle's arguments--others' statement, supporting reason/evidence, example, supporting reason/evidence, example, Aristotle's statement going against others' statement, support, example, support example, etc. The hope, then, is that the students incorporate similar argumentative structures within their own writing--offering alternative positions, reasons that support those positions, their own position, reasons supporting their position, and clarifying examples throughout. In addition to the annotation, students were to explicitly acknowledge the translator's notes from their passage within their Close-Reading. Some translators notes are incredibly helpful for understanding the text, while others may be less relevant to an introductory philosophy student (e.g., notes referring to external texts and translation disputes or ambiguities). Regardless, I wanted students to at least get in the practice of engaging with a text's endnotes as a feature of careful engagement, so they needed to in some way demonstrate that engagement. That could mean quoting the relevant note and explaining its connection to the body of the text in their own words, paraphrasing the note and its relevance, or--if the note went beyond immediate relevance to the text, to briefly say as much. 

It may seem like a Close-Reading assignment like this would be tedious for the students and ultimately lead to the (sometimes justified) criticisms of pedantry against philosophy. However, during my end-of-term, one-on-one meetings with students, I had no fewer than six students from this single class explicitly volunteer how much they appreciated the Close-Reading assignments. For context, the majority of the students in the class had never taken a philosophy course before (though there were some who had taken multiple), roughly an even split between humanities and STEM students, and the majority were in their first or second year of college. The students communicating their appreciation for this Close-Reading assignment represented a broad swath of these demographics, though. Regardless of previous experience with philosophy or perceived level of confidence reading, students expressed their appreciation for these Close-Reading assignments. Students who had not taken philosophy before but considered themselves strong readers realized that, in virtue of their reading comprehension abilities, had not developed skills or methods for approaching difficult texts. Those who had taken philosophy courses before expressed that the Close-Reading assignment made them realize how much they had likely missed in previous classes' readings because they did not know how to approach philosophical texts. Students who were less confident in their reading and writing found that this was a great opportunity to work on developing those skills in a structured way. Despite the diversity in style between Augustine, Locke, and Aristotle, students remarked that they felt more confident approaching each new author, noting that in addition to improvements in their grades on each, they also felt the improvements as they were doing each assignment. 

Introductory Symbolic Logic

In the spring of 2022, I was primary instructor for one section of "Principles of Reasoning," which was the third time I had taught the course. Based on my research in intellectual virtue cultivation and virtue education, I used intellectual virtue language to motivate different aspects of the course to my students. Following Heather Battaly's "Responsibilist Virtues in Reliabilist Classrooms," I explicitly described each assignment and section of the class in terms of developing different skills. For example, I discussed natural deduction in terms of improving pattern-recognition (where rules like modus ponens and modus tollens are better understood as 'patterns' to be found), promoting carefulness and being detail-oriented, and so on. This resulted in students expressing that they actually enjoyed doing the homework, found themselves wanting to understand, and described themselves as approaching how they think about the world differently.