In 2016 Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college in central NYS where I work passed an unusual (and possibly even unique) requirement: students must take an SSIH designated course in their concentrations (what we call the major). Here is the official language from our catalogue:
The Social, Structural, and Institutional Hierarchies Requirement: Beginning with the Class of 2020 every student must complete a concentration requirement that will focus on an understanding of structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more of the social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.)
I will talk here about my Philosophy and Film course, a 200 level course with only one prerequisite, in its pre and post SSIH iterations.
Philosophy and Film, Before and After SSIH
I have found all incarnations of this lower level course very difficult to create and teach well, even with invaluable help at the start from Tom Wartenberg, whose introductory text Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy is a cornerstone of the course. Among the challenges: a huge range of the students’ viewing sophistication and background, a large range of interests that bring them into the course (actors, cinephiles, philosophy or media studies majors), and finally, the enduring temptation of talking about the movies in unstructured and highly subjective ways. Then there is the question of how to balance primary philosophy material on the relevant topics (like the problem of skepticism) with readings from introductory philosophy of film, and aesthetics texts, and finally, philosophical papers on particular films. It’s an uneasy balance, one I’d finally gotten right, I thought, in the last pre SSIH iteration here (from 2017). In the first SSIH version (taught in Fall 2019) I was happy to continue to use the basic and excellent readings in philosophy of film and aesthetics I’d last settled on after much trial and error, but the primary source materials proved to be much harder to get right. And I made the rookie mistake of piling on readings when in fact the primary film material was so rich and provocative that I should have assigned less reading, not more, insuring the chance to make closer links between the movies and the material.
Choosing the movies to use in the old version was easy: I’d had most of them kicking around in mind to teach in such a course for years. Unfortunately, most of them had not been written about by philosophers, so I had to decide whether to go with the movies I wanted to teach or those that had good material written about them (fortunately there were a couple that met both conditions: Wartenberg on The Third Man and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
Then there is the question of the writing expectations. The ten short paper assignments are reflections; I borrowed this language from a number of friends’ and acquaintances’ syllabi (some in literature, some in philosophy), and use it to emphasize that I am not necessarily looking for thesis driven arguments. I want students to make a link between the relevant philosophical topics (some meta), and some feature of what is on the screen, for example, close readings of some feature or features of the movies themselves that do interesting philosophical work in them: what that work is, and how the movie (or scene) does it. These assignments are harder to grade than most short papers in philosophy – an unusual variety of approaches can be successful, and the inclination to generalities are hard to curb. Though it doesn’t take too long to move students away from plot summary in our discussion of the movies, the urge to talk about the movies and the philosophical themes in them very broadly is another matter. It helps to post some successful reflections from past versions of the course (on movies they won’t be writing on), and I repeatedly point them to excellent models of how to proceed in the Wartenberg.
In both versions of the course far and away the most successful outcomes have been the appreciation movies provide us with on 1. arcs of character development over time and in response to a variety of circumstances; 2. moral complexity, with clever defeaters of our natural tendency to focus on moral simplicity; and 3. the ability to convey extremely complex information non verbally, by both the filmmakers (I use the term broadly to include, for example, editors, sound directors, etc.) and actors. The capacity of movies to advance our understanding of these central features of our moral and epistemological lives is significant, and compares well with traditional works of philosophy.
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Katheryn Doran
Katheryn Doran teaches courses on American philosophy, environmental ethics, and philosophy and film at Hamilton College. She co-edited Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills and has published papers on skepticism, and philosophy and film. She served on the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy 2013-16, and was the guest editor of the APA Newsletter on teaching philosophy in non-traditional settings. Doran has run a philosophy book group in prison from 2007-2020 and looks forward to resuming that work.
https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/our-faculty/directory/faculty-detail/katheryn-doran
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