I started teaching at Centenary College of Louisiana in August 2001. It was oppressively hot in Shreveport. I was just getting to know my students. I hoped to convert my “visiting” appointment into a tenure-track job, so everything needed to go well. A couple of weeks into the semester, early in September, I got into my car, turned on the radio, and heard a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York. Suddenly, my focus was no longer on me.
Students came to me over the next week with questions. Once the initial emotional shock had passed, they wanted to think about what had happened and how people responded. We ordered pizza for the first meeting and discussed the difference between acts of war and crimes. Why do we treat them so differently? Are they morally different? Would it be better to think about the World Trade Center attack as a crime or an act of war? When we finished up, the students wanted to meet again, and so the Philosophy Discussion Group was born. (I’ve never been great at finding inspiring names.)
I’ve been leading informal philosophical discussions for 20 years now, though I have had no formal training in leading discussions. I didn’t participate in a philosophy club as an undergraduate. I have spent my career at a small liberal-arts college in a moderate-sized Southern city. I speak only from experience, so take what applies to your situation and leave the rest.
I have tried to keep the group informal. We meet from 6-8 on the second Wednesday of the month. We created a constitution because we wanted funds from the Student Government Association to pay for the pizza. In my experience, a formal structure causes students to disengage. They played their assigned role, nothing else, and sometimes not even that. All we needed was pizza and a topic. I wrote up a global email with the topic and a short, provocative paragraph. I didn’t want to leave promotion to students because it would take longer and be less effective. The email was my main point of contact with our audience, and I needed to get it right. I have learned to use our marketing department to request posters, social media posts, and other announcements, and they have been helpful. If the number of participants starts dwindling, I encourage the students to bring a friend. I carefully plan the beginning of the school year and spring semester so that the Philosophy Discussion Group would be part of my student’s habits. Even so, participation can vary widely from year to year.
The topic is critical. People come because they want a space to discuss, and the rise of social media has only increased their hunger for civil, thoughtful, face-to-face conversations. I have experimented with short readings, and, for a while, I wrote a two-page primer on each topic. These rarely help the meeting because too many participants don’t read them ahead of time. They can help me promote the discussion. If someone is interested, I can hand them one of the primers I wrote or an article to keep us in mind.
The topic needs to be something people can discuss without much background. At the end of the meeting, I ask them what they want to discuss next time. Rather than let them choose, I listen to their concerns and then mold them into a topic. I know more about how to frame a good conversation than they do. I prepare a two-minute opening statement and end with a leading question to start the conversation. After that, it’s crucial to have a generous discussion. I am not grading them. Each idea is a hypothesis to be explored. If a hypothesis fails, we go back and revise. I have a loose map of the positions philosophers take on an issue. If the conversation dies down or needs a new direction, I can approach it from a different perspective. With a little prompting from me, they usually ‘discover’ the leading philosophical positions. They feel accomplished when they do because they can see the issue arising organically from the conversation.
About once per year, I do something different to keep things fresh. We met to discuss Nietzsche recently. They didn’t have the background and weren’t going to read his books. This isn’t a class. I provided a quick biography, and then I summarized a key idea, e.g., ressentiment. We would debate it until that discussion lost steam, and then I would introduce another one.
The most significant evolution in my discussion group came about five years ago. A philosophy and accounting major interviewed with a national accounting firm. They spent the entire interview asking her about philosophy. A group of accountants realized how much they missed the discussions they had as undergraduates and decided to meet over lunch to discuss philosophy. In the end, she got the job, and I got an idea. I would open my discussion group to the community.
Another former student had recently moved back to Shreveport. Together, we transformed the Philosophy Discussion Group into the Shreveport Philosophical Forum. (My naming skills have not improved.) We have about six regulars and others who stop by occasionally. They come from different parts of the community. Several are members of our local humanist group. Two Episcopal priests regularly attend, as well as a lawyer, a member of the Air Force, and a couple of engineers. The one thing they all have in common is that they want some friendly, intellectual discussion.
With the community involved, some exciting things can happen. Our discussion on the ethics of sex work brought in a larger audience than usual, including a couple of people who work in law enforcement and a sex worker. We had a productive discussion, and they became regulars for a while. Our discussion about abortion introduced me to people who provide abortions and another person who runs an adoption agency, and I’ve integrated them as guests in my Bioethics course. We have moved our conversations online due to COVID-19, and I made a point to invite my former students who no longer live in the area. It’s fun to see them and a great way to keep in touch.
What do I get out of this? This, I think, is the strangest part. Few of the philosophy majors participate in these discussions regularly. Often, they are already highly involved students, so they have little time for another club. Very few students have become philosophy majors as a direct result of participating in these discussions. The effect is more diffuse. The posters and emails raise my department’s profile on campus. Students take philosophy classes because they see the topics we discuss, even when they don’t come to the meetings. Faculty from other departments occasionally attend, and they all know what we do. (By the way, these are all reasons to forge ahead even when attendance drops off. You can still achieve these benefits, and attendance will pick up again if you stick with it. These things ebb and flow.)
When recruiting students for the college, I talk about the discussions. I give them examples of recent topics or debates and then hand them a primer. (You don’t recruit students by describing your department. You recruit them by giving them a sample.) Informal conversations with students at the philosophy club help me stay in touch with their perspective. I learn what issues they are struggling with personally. My classes can address those issues. I learn how they perceive other professors, campus initiatives, and sometimes get better feedback on my teaching than I have ever had in a class evaluation. I encourage you to start a philosophy club if you enjoy the energy and ideas of philosophical novices. If you believe that philosophy is a worthwhile activity for everyone, you’ll have a chance to practice with genuinely interested and enthusiastic people and raise the profile of philosophy in your community.
Chris Ciocchetti
Chris Ciocchetti is the Beaird Chair of Philosophy at Centenary College of Louisiana. He has worked to connect philosophy to his community through discussion groups, service-learning at the Martin Luther King Health Center and Pharmacy, taking his courses for site visits to a homeless shelter, an abortion clinic, locations important to the civil rights movement in Shreveport, and hosting guest speakers publish a column in the Shreveport Times.
