For many, “philosophy” primarily evokes activity related to the love of wisdom rather than a body of knowledge or collection of facts.  First seen in the child’s incessant questions and exuberant quest to understand the world, philosophical activity arises from wonder.  Wonder brings puzzlement and the struggle to understand.  These give birth to argument, analysis, discussion, and dialogue.

But “philosophy” also evokes the collective product of the activity as recorded in a body of literature.  The literature recalls discussions that may have transpired across generations and over centuries. It reveals the roots of certain beliefs that have been absorbed by our culture and so teaches us something about ourselves. The literature also brings us into the conversation and shows us how to do the activity.

This duality manifests in great diversity among Introduction to Philosophy courses.

The first philosophy course I took devoted an entire semester to Plato’s Republic.  (Perhaps the instructor was inspired by Whitehead’s “footnotes to Plato” remark.)  Introductory courses often use primary sources, but many present only commentary.  A fair number abandon traditional course materials altogether, building instead on fiction, film, trade books, court cases, maps [see Coppenger’s Cases and Maps], and/or who knows what else.  “Content” also varies widely.  Some courses take a “great ideas” approach [think Loewer’s 30-Second Philosophies]; others prefer a more integrated “problems” approach [think Russell’s Problems of Philosophy]; others approach the subject as or through history [think Durant’s Story of Philosophy]; yet others present some subset or combination of the “areas” of philosophical thought (axiology, epistemology, logic/critical thinking, metaphysics/ontology).  Some sacrifice scope for depth; others depth for scope.  Clearly, two neophyte students (even at one college) can glean totally different impressions of philosophy.

For the great majority of students, an intro course will be their only exposure to philosophy.  They will enter with their native, once-powerful sense of awe and wonder mostly having been crushed.  Their academic training will have focused on compartmentalized thinking and (quickly forgotten) rote learning.  They come, having lost their inner child.

Surely, every introduction to philosophy intends for students to rediscover Wonder and Awe, to rediscover their inquisitive inner child and to guide that child to strive for clarity of meaning, to demand evidence, and to reason well.  Here is the unity in the diversity.  The focus is on philosophy as activity.

But if focus is limited to philosophy as activity, the picture of philosophy will be seriously incomplete.  I ended my introductory semester having never heard of Aristotle or Descartes or Kant or nearly anyone other than Plato and Socrates.  I had an overly limited view of the range and methods of philosophical inquiry, no awareness of how philosophical threads connect generations, and no idea what role philosophy might play in culture or in my own (unexamined) beliefs.

After half a century of experimentation, I have come to believe that the best way to introduce philosophy as activity is through philosophy as product.   Coaches regularly utilize game films to inspire and improve those they coach.  Original writings[1] of philosophical thinkers, taken in threads, compose the game films of philosophy.  One thread can reignite Wonder, but which thread(s) will do so varies with the individual.  Introductory courses need more than one thread.

It isn’t difficult to find masterful works that clearly form threads.  The challenge has been with brevity.  Today’s students seem to find reading itself to be an onerous task.  They will struggle through five pages, but will almost never read more than ten.  Ultimately, I had to edit selections to meet this reality without losing too much flavor or richness.  The collection can be found here.

The readings I build on include something of axiology, epistemology, logic, and metaphysics/ontology.  After a bit of groundwork, I lay out an approach to thinking that focuses on three questions:

• What does that mean?
• What is the evidence?
• So what?  [What follows?  Why should I care?]

I then turn successively to questions of society and politics,[2] knowledge and reality, God, human nature, personal identity, and free will.[3]

MWF classes meet 41 times in a semester. The following assignment calendar lays out the details.

Calendar – Introduction to Philosophy (MWF) – Cardwell

* GW = Growing Wisdom (2^nd ed.)

** Peer feedback: 5 posts – see syllabus for details.

You will notice that a “Position Paper” is among the written work included in the calendar.  If there is anything that garners universal agreement among philosophy instructors, it’s the need for students to try their hand at “philosophical” writing.  Exactly what that writing should be is not unanimous.  Innovation Abstracts published an article in which I explain what a position paper is and what I see as its advantages.  I will not rehearse this information now.  APA members can access it by clicking here, and I am happy to send a copy of the article to anyone who asks.  (My email address is below.) I will note that I “sell” the assignment to students based on the idea that a Position Paper and a business memo fundamentally differ only in content, and that being able to write a good business memo is a useful and important skill in the “real” world.

The syllabus as distributed to students (technically a “supplement” to a generic “Master Syllabus” to which all sections must conform) comprises the first appendix (below).

The second appendix comprises Position Paper instructions (which are understood to be parts of the “supplemental” syllabus).  The appendices should be self explanatory, but some comments about my grading system may be in order.

Students who submit all assignments and always come to class are guaranteed at least a passing grade (“D”).  Some grade items require only submission for full credit.  The de facto minimum score for a Position Paper is sixty percent of the points possible.  Students self-report attendance and participation by submitting the following form at the end of each class meeting:

This seems to encourage “good student” behavior.  (It also makes it easy to record attendance, which I am required to do to satisfy financial aid considerations.)  Each “T” is worth one point.  Thus, daily grades potentially produce 200 of the 1000 points possible for the whole course.

My grade system recognizes that the demands on students who take Introduction to Philosophy differ significantly from familiar demands that they have come to expect.  Many struggle to adapt.  They find it a great challenge to learn with understanding rather than to learn by rote.  They may well never have written a paper of any sort (much less a paper in which they take a stand and support it).  But if a student submits all assignments and always comes to class, I am confident that they have in fact been introduced to philosophy.  Their transcripts should reflect that fact.

I am happy to respond to questions.  I can be reached at cecardwell@pstcc.edu.

[1] Secondary sources lose too much.  I learn a lot more about basketball by watching LeBron than by hearing some commentator on the radio tell me what is going on.  Secondary sources can also mislead.  It is said that Russell was a great fan of Hegel… until he actually read Hegel.

[2] What about ethics? As do most colleges, in addition to Introduction to Philosophy, we offer Introduction to Ethics.  In part to minimize duplication, in part to address a lacuna created with the absence of civics instruction in primary and secondary schools, and in part because I find ethics too rich and diverse to give a fair picture in the time I could allot in a general introduction, I have chosen primarily to represent axiology with political philosophy rather than ethics.

[3] I realize that this is a lot to cover, but I have found that nearly every student finds something here that rekindles Wonder and I did not find that when I covered less.  Furthermore, the fast pace minimizes opportunities for boredom.

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Charles Cardwell

Dr. Charles E. Cardwell, Professor Emeritus at Pellissippi State Community College, has served as president of the Tennessee Philosophical Association (TPAWeb.org), is the author of Argument and Inference: An introduction to Symbolic Logic (Charles E. Merrill), Hornbook Ethics (Hackett), Growing Wisdom: An Invitation to Western Philosophy (Kendall Hunt), and a number of journal articles.  Though officially retired, he continues to teach Introduction to Philosophy classes and finds great joy in doing so.