In many respects, the way I taught Proseminar – the first-year graduate seminar – in Fall 2020 was very down the line. We read two books closely, and the authors visited the class (virtually). Since it was Prosem, the weeks of content were interspersed with material on professionalization: on writing philosophy, presenting in seminar, giving talks, publishing, the job market, and mental health (inter alia). I won’t touch on most of this, though I do want to pause to note how important it is to talk about mental health issues with incoming graduate students, if only to discuss how normal and easy it is to seek professional mental health care is in academic institutions. My main goal here, though, is to focus on the two questions I’ve thought about most with regard to how to teach Prosem.
The first concerns how to balance two pedagogical goals. The first concerns the diversifying the canon. Insofar as there is a canon in philosophy, graduate students are expected to know it. Either explicitly or implicitly, knowledge of the canon will often be presupposed in other courses, articles, and talks, for example. To not teach the canon at all seems irresponsible. But the canon is, perhaps even more so than the discipline itself, monochromatic and male—and I take the problems that creates to be far from superficial and symbolic. More so than other courses, what we teach in Prosem reifies the canon.
So, I wanted to find a way to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis here. The path I chose was to pick two books that built upon canonical work in core areas (metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics) to do important work in feminist and social philosophy: Elizabeth Barnes’ The Minority Body and Mary Kate McGowan’s Just Words. To run with the latter choice for a moment, by reading McGowan students learn about semantics and pragmatics and speech act theory, subtle differences between David Lewis’ conversational score and Bob Stalnaker’s common ground; but this canonical material is used to build a compelling case for how and why forms of racist and sexist speech constitute a particular kind of ‘hidden harm’.
This was, I should say, still a fairly conservative approach to diversifying the canon. It’s closest to (but probably still more conservative than) what Luvell Anderson and Verena Erlenbusch call ‘the critical model’ in their excellent essay, ‘Modeling Inclusive Pedagogy’. And the syllabus was still, among other things, monochromatic. I’m certainly not claiming this solution to be ideal, and I’m open to suggestions about how to do better.
The second question I’ve thought about most is how to talk about core philosophical skills. My graduate education, like many, was most explicit about the skill of clear, logical argumentation. I think this skill is simultaneously massively neglected and massively overvalued. Try to set students the task of finding a deductively valid argument for the thesis of famous papers in philosophy and they’ll often come up short, because there often isn’t one unless you really squint (and attribute to the author premises they never even implicitly defend). But the skill is simultaneously overvalued simply because logical argumentation doesn’t come close to exhausting the kinds of valuable contributions that philosophers can and do make.
When I taught Prosem in 2019, one of the students—Alex Tolbert, a former D1 basketball player—asked a question that stuck with me. (Reader beware: there’s a sportsball analogy ahead.) If you start basketball training, you’ll be told what core skills you need to have: to dribble, to pass, to layup, to shoot. You need a decent mastery of each, and from there, you can specialize to be a different kind of valuable player. Compare that to a graduate education in philosophy. What are the core skills everyone needs to work on? And in what ways can they specialize from there to make different kinds of valuable contributions to the field?
My approach to this was a bit haphazard. I thought about philosophers whose work I think I value greatly, but in very distinct ways, and thought about the different virtues it manifested. Obviously a lot of valuable contributions in philosophy involve valid arguments, either as objections to (think Gettier) or positive motivations for theories, and obviously much of what graduate students write will take that form. But that isn’t the only skill for them to work on. Sally Haslanger’s work, I think, is more valuable for the way it builds sophisticated theories than for the way it argues for them—being an excellent theory-builder is a way of being an excellent philosopher. Or consider Nelson Goodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’. It wears what kind of valuable contribution it’s making on its sleeve: it exposes a ‘riddle’, a philosophical problem that urgently needs to be solved. Being an excellent problem-generator is also a way of being an excellent philosopher. And while some philosophers seem to treat positing distinctions as an end in itself—think of G.A. Cohen’s impersonation of Gilbert Ryle—some excellent contributions to the field take the form of making critical distinctions that clarify the questions and the conceptual space for available answers.
I’m still thinking about this issue, because I don’t think I have an exhaustive list of the ways of being an excellent philosopher, let alone a clear demarcation of which of the relevant virtues involve core skills that everyone should master to a decent degree in grad school. Maybe theory-building is like dribbling and problem-generating is like blocking. I do think, though, that we’d do better by graduate students if we could collectively consider these matters. (Feel free to add any thoughts on this below.) As it stands, it feels a bit like we’re telling all graduate students that they have to be Steph Curry. It’s not just bad advice. It’s bad for the field. Collectively, we’ll make more progress from having a field of philosophers who manifest the full range of excellent virtues than from having a team of top-notch shooters; so collectively, we should taxonomize, train, celebrate, and incentivize these skills, rather than just repeating the importance of argumentation ad nauseum.
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Daniel Wodak
Daniel Wodak is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. They work primarily in ethics, philosophy of law, and social and political philosophy.
