My program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison occasionally accepts proposals for “special topics” philosophy classes — if you are a graduate student instructor and your proposal gets chosen, then you get to teach the course. I proposed “Philosophy in American Politics” and found out that I will be teaching it over the Summer 2020 semester (read: I haven’t actually taught this yet!). There were two main reasons I wanted to focus on the philosophical issues that arise in contemporary American politics. The first is relevance: with the 2020 elections looming in the near future, I thought a course like this would not only capture the attention of students and provide us with ample class material, but I was also hopeful that the class could give them some tools to use to think more clearly and rigorously about the complex social phenomena taking place. My interest in American politics is long-standing but has grown since I began working on a project on fake news with my husband Frank Cabrera (a philosopher at the Milwaukee School of Engineering). I am also independently interested in the philosophy of language and wanted something (like a class!) to justify my time-consuming fascination with the nature of political discourse.
The development of the syllabus happened basically by keeping my eyes and ears open to new topics and methods in contemporary political discourse. For example, an extremely new feature (relatively speaking) of American politics is the use of social media as a campaign tool. For most undergraduate students, social media has been a big part of their lives since they were very young, and this can make it difficult to really scrutinize these platforms to see how campaign techniques have changed and, possibly, become more predatory as a result of social media.
One learning outcome that I have for most of the courses I teach, this one included, is that the students learn how to identify an argument in some prose and recreate it formally. There are two reasons I think this is important: first, this is a real, tangible skill that they can take with them when the class is over. I’ve had many students shock themselves with their ability to learn how to reconstruct arguments. Additionally, this skill can help safeguard students from fallacious rhetoric in the future — and in a class about American politics, this is hopefully something they will end up feeling the importance of!
Because this course is designed as a summer class — a four-week intensive course divided into eight units — it would need a bit of redesigning if taught during a normal-length semester. The downside to the accelerated intensive syllabus is that it does not leave me time to cover all the topics I wanted to talk about — for instance, corporate personhood, anti-trust laws, and the ethics of single-issue voting. However, an upside to this schedule is that students get to know each other better by being in class with one another for three hours a day, four days a week. I think this is particularly edifying in a class on the extremely divisive topic of American politics; I am hoping that students come away from the experience reflecting on all of the civil and helpful conversations they had in class with peers who disagree with them politically.
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Megan Fritts
Megan Fritts, Philosophy PhD Candidate and Instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, works primarily in the philosophy of action and value theory, as well as 19thcentury European philosophy. She is the author of“Kierkegaard and Binswanger on Faith’s Relation to Love”, and co-editor ofThe Hurricane Notebook: Three Dialogues on the Human Condition (Wisdom/Works, Forthcoming).
