In the Spring of 2022, I had the honor of teaching a capstone course for senior philosophy majors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. What distinguishes a capstone course from a normal course? Depends on the program and who you ask, of course. But I think it’s uncontroversial to say this: A good capstone course should contain content that’s at an advanced level and a substantial assignment where students demonstrate the skills they’ve acquired and developed in (usually several) previous philosophy courses—such as a research paper.
As I thought about how to design my first capstone, I kept thinking about that phrase “advanced level.” What should a good advanced-level course be, particularly for philosophy majors? It shouldn’t only be about assigning harder readings or having them learn more sophisticated concepts, although it should involve some of that. Ideally, I thought, a capstone will feel like a payoff of doing the major in the first place. Then I stopped fixating on the phrase and remembered something important: “Wait, I’ve been trained to do philosophy at an advanced level! What experiences formed my concept of what that looks like?” My first answer was immediate: grad school. Could I create a course that resembled my best graduate seminars but is appropriately tailored for undergraduates? If I could, then my capstone would be an advanced-level learning experience, such that professional philosophers could look at the course and likely affirm, “Yep, that’s how you learn to start doing philosophy at an advanced level.” So that’s what I endeavored to do.
I chose “Death and Immortality” as my course topic for a few reasons. One, I had a little experience in the area. I don’t mean that I’ve died before, and I’m not actually immortal; sorry to disappoint! The experience was working as a research assistant for a Templeton grant on these topics some years ago. (It was called The Immortality Project, and it was led by John Martin Fischer (UC-Riverside). You can learn more about it at this website.) Two, the philosophy of death and immortality is a fascinating area of philosophy in that it deals with debates that straddle three of the major areas of philosophy generally: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Consequently, it could accommodate a range of students with different philosophy backgrounds and potentially fill in gaps in their learning: students who had more M&E from previous courses could get more exposure to value theory, and vice versa.
To recreate the seminar experience, I had to be very deliberate in my course design. I also needed a little luck, and I got lucky on a few counts. One was that I was assigned a state-of-the-art classroom that had wheeled tables instead of desks. The tables could be easily moved—so several students and I would arrive to class early and rearrange the tables in the shape of a long “conference room” table, like so many of us had in grad school. Another fortuity was that the class size was small, only 15 students. Our class meetings were like most grad seminars: collaborative yet rigorous, a rich and lively group discussion (most of the time) where the students are developing good questions and insights and feel like they’re doing philosophy with the professor and their peers, rather than the professor talking at a group of students from an elevated position. Even if a professor is humble and personable, we must not forget that we’re elevated by default if we’re standing while students are sitting. That perception of elevation may get amplified when the one standing has letters (Ph.D.) that signify authority. Not to mention students’ perception of the professor as an authority figure! Sometimes professors must stand because of class size, room design, and to keep a lecture energized, but in my experience, all these structures affect the learning experience, sometimes for ill. We need to be aware of them to help students get the most out of philosophy courses.
My students loved the seminar format. Some students said it made them feel like they were doing more “authentic” philosophy. Two aspects of the curriculum facilitated this result, I think:
- The expert presentations. Although it’s worth only 10% of the course grade, this assignment demands that students hone their philosophical skills. Throughout the semester, I assign students a paper or book chapter for which they will be our “resident expert.” Then there’ll be one meeting where they’re scheduled to bring in a handout summarizing their reading in about 600-700 words—the author’s main question, thesis, argument, and also a few questions for discussion. The students don’t give a formal presentation; they sit at the seminar table and do most of the talking. The expectation is that they’ll get our conversation going for the meeting they’re scheduled, and since they’re a resident expert on the piece, we may call on their expertise later on if their author/topic comes up in conversation again. This keeps the preparation and participation level high. Several of my grad professors—Robin Jeshion (USC), Erich Reck, and Carl Cranor (UC-Riverside)—used a technique like this. It was instrumental to me learning how to distill complex, abstract writing, and also what immersive intellectual activity demands.
I did two things to help students get ready for the expert presentations. First, I gave them a template, which I’ve included with my syllabus. (I’ve also included a schedule so you can see how to organize the assignment.) Second, for class meetings where no expert presentations were scheduled, I’d make a 1-2-page handout on the week’s reading to lead the discussion. We did this for 3-4 weeks before the first expert presentation. This gives students enough time to acclimate to the seminar format, and to understand the expectations. Incidentally, I have found that physical handouts enable quality discussion in that they reduce the “technoference” of laptops and make students focus on the material during class!
- Narrative-oriented pedagogy / less is more. To become good critical thinkers, I think it’s important that students understand relationships between ideas—that very often, what you believe in one area has implications for what you believe in another area. Let’s say you accept the deprivationist thesis that death is bad because it deprives a person of future goods. It would be a peculiar thing, then, if you said you also accept Bernard Williams’s famous argument that human immortality is undesirable because it’d be necessarily boring. For Williams, death is not a bad thing because it gives our lives meaning and a definitive ending to our life story, something we’d lose if we lived for indefinitely many years. It’s wonderful to be able to defend a single thesis, but arguments don’t live in a vacuum. Consistency matters. Moreover, if you can explain how philosophical tensions can be reconciled, you may well have the beginnings of an original view. I worry that brief “2-weeks-and-done” units on individual issues, while perhaps interesting in their own right, discourage deeper understanding.
I do three things to help students learn how to recognize relationships between ideas. First, I plan my reading schedule so that the transition between topics will feel natural and seamless. I also assign fewer readings that we develop over several meetings to make it easier for students to recognize the connections between one author and/or topic and another. (I’ve taken to doing this in my lower-level courses as well.) Second, I include a diagram on the course syllabus for keeping track of the course narrative. I call it “world-building” (the idea is modeled on the Jesuit idea of education as “world-affirming”). The basic idea of “world-building” is to view the course as a story of ideas about some topic(s). The story unfolds as we meet, and our class meetings are like chapters in the story. Students keep track of the story by summarizing the main takeaways of our meetings in each block. We fill in blocks gradually, every few meetings, by doing a quick recap of what we’ve learned. This promotes course engagement and retention, and again, it helps students recognize the connections between topics and authors. I’ve included blank and filled-in versions of the diagram to give you an idea of how to use it. Finally, I motivate the narrative. I don’t start by saying, “Hey, here’s what philosophers have thought about death for a long time.” Instead, I start by showing that we have an empirical basis for thinking that people believe that death is a bad thing (Terror Management Theory), then I get into Epicurus’s “death is nothing to us” argument. The more the student can connect the philosophy to something real from the first, the more likely they’ll stay with the narrative project.
Of course, the class size is key. I am skeptical that a seminar can be done effectively with more than 15 because, before long, the intimacy and joy of doing philosophy at the table with others will be hindered by feeling cramped and having insufficient workspace.
In a future offering of the course, I plan to incorporate more material on the role of culture in our judgments about death, in addition to the material I already do on Eastern perspectives on immortality (emphasizing Hinduism and Buddhism). One limitation of the philosophical literature on death and immortality is that it’s very Western-centric. Finally, a more general, practical point: I strongly recommend writing a longish, detailed breakdown of each grade component on your syllabus. Nowadays I receive very few student emails asking about assignments (because it’s all on the syllabus), which saves me a lot of time. But more importantly, a detailed curriculum helps students feel safe, because it shows you are prepared.
NOTE: For the complete version of the world-building diagram, in some blocks I have used text that comes directly from the assigned readings. As much as possible, I’ve tried to include the authors’ names where I have done this. Unfortunately, the blocks are too small to list full reference info. Where I have accidentally omitted an author’s name, please consider it an instance of fair use for classroom purposes. For complete citations, please see the reading schedule on pages 6 and 7 of the syllabus.
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Heinrik Hellwig
Heinrik Hellwig is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Seton Hall University, where he teaches courses in applied ethics and pre-law.
