In theory, philosophy can be about anything. In practice, this is mostly fantasy. Philosophy is today as specialized a discipline as any other, which is probably both inevitable and good. But lately, I have been trying to take philosophy’s theoretical promise of freedom seriously—to focus a little less on well-established topics, and (however clumsily) a little more on topics that emerge from real life, everyday experience, and instinctive interests.
I recently tried to do this in my teaching. Last semester I taught a new undergraduate course I designed on the topic of “first contact.” By this, I didn’t only mean first contact with aliens—though I did mean that—but with all sorts of things in life: new ideas, media, experiences, people, cultures, lifeforms, natural phenomena, states of mind, states of being, etc. I just had the amorphous sense that, if I could teach any course I wanted, this would be it, and that the experience of first contact was both interesting and at the heart of several other topics I was interested in, including the feeling of wonder, which I am hoping to write about soon. So the motivation to teach this class was basically selfish. But I figured anything that would make me more invested in my teaching would ultimately benefit the students as well.
“First contact” obviously isn’t an established topic in philosophy. It is perhaps easier to imagine it as a thematic basis for a course in psychology, anthropology, astronomy, or linguistics. And even within philosophy, it is hard to know which sub-discipline it might slot into, especially since I interpreted the idea so broadly. This presented various challenges. First, since I was trained as a moral and political philosopher, it meant I had to teach a course on a topic that quite frankly I knew little about. I didn’t mind this, in principle, since it meant I would be forced to learn lots of new stuff. But still, it was an obstacle. Second, it meant I would have to do much more work than usual to locate philosophical questions and readings that fit within the course’s broader theme. And relatedly, third, in locating appropriate philosophical readings and topics, I wanted to make sure that these weren’t too “dry”—that the course genuinely reflected my basic desire to do philosophy in a way that maintained a close, vibrant connection to everyday life and experience.
To address the first challenge, regarding my lack of expertise, one thing I did was make sure the students knew I should be regarded as more of a co-inquirer than an authority on many of the topics we covered. But also, and more importantly, I relied on the expertise of generous colleagues, i.e., guest lecturers. Prof. Sophie-Grace Chappell kindly joined us to talk about her new work on epiphanies. My colleague Derek Ball joined us to discuss xenolinguistics—a subdiscipline of linguistics that focuses on communication with extraterrestrial life. And Prof. Mark Harris, an anthropologist at my University who specializes in Amazonian peoples, joined us to discuss 16th Century accounts of “first contact” between Europeans and South Americans. Having guest lecturers was fun for the students, a good learning experience for me, and helped ensure that I didn’t have to pretend to know things I didn’t.
Having guest lectures also helped with the second challenge, since I could often rely on them to help locate sensible philosophical (and non-philosophical) readings and questions for each week. In weeks where I didn’t have a guest lecturer to rely on, we focused on topics (such as wonder, the sublime, transformative experience, or death, etc.) that I felt were a good fit for the course, that were interesting in their own right, that I wanted to learn more about, and that I could run a discussion of at least somewhat competently. So, nothing out of the ordinary there—I assume these are quite common criteria for syllabus design.
Finally, with regards to keeping things “real,” and connected to everyday experience, here I did two things that, for me, were new. First, each week’s assigned readings included at least one “case study,” which was a real world (i.e., literary, historical, scientific, or journalistic) example of the sort of thing we were trying to philosophically analyze or reflect on. So, for example, in the week on wonder, we read Adam Smith’s theory of wonder as he presents it in his History of Astronomy, alongside an essay by the naturalist Rachel Carson on her efforts to inspire wonder in her nephew. This practice of combining abstract theory with textured “examples” worked really well, I thought. The latter were often a source of fruitful class discussion and critical insight.
Second, as a marked assignment, the students were required to write a “reflection” on how some experience, event, or thing they had seen or read outside of class bears on a debate covered in the course syllabus. This was a great exercise, and something I plan to keep on doing in other courses. The students unsurprisingly seemed to enjoy taking philosophy outside the classroom, and often wrote beautifully and compellingly about experiences (of bereavements, breakups, epiphanies, etc.) that challenged, confirmed, or interestingly connected with readings assigned for the class. Like most others, I normally don’t enjoy grading papers. But I enjoyed grading these reflections.
So all in all this teaching experiment went well, I thought. There were some mistakes. For one, I was so anxious to make sure that we had enough to discuss each week that I often assigned way too much reading. I was also disappointed that, for their final essay, more than half the students wrote on the same topic: whether one should fear (one’s own) death. I think they converged on this question because, of everything we covered, it was the most standard, safest focus for a philosophy paper. But this meant I hadn’t done a good enough job making clear philosophical sense of other, less standard topics. In the future, I should probably try to facilitate this by giving students a list of possible essay questions, one for each week, so they at least have an idea of how to approach an essay on less standard topics.
I do look forward to (hopefully) teaching this course again one day. It was pedagogically odd and risky. But it was also the most rewarding teaching experience I’ve had yet.
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Adam Etinson
Adam Etinson is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. His recent publications include “What’s So Special About Human Dignity?” in Philosophy & Public Affairs (2020), and Human Rights: Moral or Political? (Oxford University Press, 2018).
