If asked to imagine what a “philosopher” looks like, most people would probably picture someone a bit detached from the real world. The stereotypical philosopher is always deep in thought, treating their social life (if they even have one) as a mere distraction. Pierre Hadot, on the other hand, had a much different picture of philosophical life. For Hadot, a seminal figure for the contemporary Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) movement, philosophy does not take place in isolation. Instead, philosophical life is “intimately linked to philosophical discourse,” (What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 4) making it something that is best lived in a community.
But even though community and dialogue are central to philosophical life, deep, reflective conversations are very challenging for first-time philosophy students. In our own case, we were hoping to incorporate philosophical dialogue into our Spring 2021 class “The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” at Florida State University. Not only were many of our students coming to philosophical dialogue for the first time, but the politically loaded nature of the discussion made having productive conversations that much more difficult. In order to help our students overcome these challenges, we relied on several key principles of the Philosophy as a Way of Life Project: Pursuit of the Good Life, Student-Led Dialogue, Diverse Classrooms, and Immersive Assignments. In this post, we’ll share how we structured dialogue within our course through the inspiration of these PWOL principles.
Pursuit of the Good Life
As part of our course structure, students met once a week for small group discussions. The first challenge that we faced was how to frame these dialogues. Why talk about topics like the philosophy of race and gender when they inevitably lead to so much disagreement? This is where the first PWOL principle, Pursuit of the Good Life, was essential. To help our students see the significance of these conversations, we approached the topics by thinking about their everyday implications. Sometimes these were obvious, other times less so. For example, how would it affect someone’s life if race is a social construct? What would it mean for how they understood themselves and what it would take for them to live a flourishing life? Or how would different theories of gender transform how we think about ourselves in the world? The answers to these questions are not always clear, and it was helpful to remind students that we not only want to understand race and gender, but we want to appreciate the ways that they affect our day-to-day lives.
We also discussed the societal impact of different views of race and gender. Along with considering the moral issues raised by systemic racism and abortion legislation, we also focused on the hostility and polarization surrounding these and other issues related to race and gender. Many of our students reported that their relationships had been seriously affected by disagreements surrounding these issues, making it clear that living the good life is not only a matter of understanding race and gender but also of cultivating the virtues necessary for engaging charitably with others. The dialogue groups themselves were an important method for building these habits, as they allowed students to grow in open-mindedness and intellectual humility throughout the semester.
Student-Led Dialogue
Another challenge that we faced was creating student-driven dialogue. Many of our students were accustomed to “discussion sections” that were more like remedial lectures than they were genuine conversations. Our goal for students, though, was that they start having genuine, collaborative philosophical conversations. Enter the second principle of PWOL classrooms, Student-Led Dialogue. Each of our dialogue groups was led by the students themselves, giving them the space to practice initiating authentic philosophical discussions. This process began with the creation of group discussion norms. During the first dialogue session, students chose the rules that they wanted their conversations to follow, guidelines like “Charitable Listening: Always assume that group members mean well when sharing and allow them to clarify if misconstrued.” The creation of these norms was the first way that students took responsibility for creating a healthy, ongoing philosophical dialogue.
Once the group norms were established, all students had the opportunity to lead the dialogue group during the semester. To ensure that the conversations were focused on the topics of the course, dialogue group leaders would prepare a lesson plan for the discussion beforehand and get feedback from their TA. The plan started with a get-to-know-you activity to build trust and familiarity among dialogue participants. The lesson plan then included the discussion questions that the leaders planned on asking, questions like “To what extent do you think society creates gender roles, and to what extent do you think these are something deeper than just societal conditioning?” and “Are gender roles important for a healthy society?” When leading the dialogue itself, leaders were also expected to ask follow-up questions that considered opposing viewpoints and moved the conversation forward. Thus, all students were able to practice creating philosophical conversations from scratch, not depending on someone else to lead the discussion for them.
Diverse Classrooms
Even with students leading the dialogue groups, we still wanted to make sure that marginalized voices were not left out of the conversation, a challenge we were able to address with the PWOL emphasis on Diverse Classrooms. Creating a diverse classroom meant that our dialogue groups would hear many different perspectives and viewpoints, helping participants to be more open-minded and intellectually humble. Fortunately for our purposes, the student population at FSU is already fairly diverse. According to demographic data collected in 2020 about the entire student body, approximately 42 percent of students identified as male, and 58 percent of students identified as female, while approximately 58 percent of students identified as white and 42 percent did not. This on-campus diversity was amplified in our course, as many underrepresented students were interested in a course on the philosophy of race and gender. This allowed our dialogue groups to have students from many different walks of life, diversifying the conversation and allowing students to hear many different points of view.
Immersive Assignments
Finally, we didn’t want our students to abandon what they had learned in their dialogue groups as soon as they stepped out the door. It’s easy for undergraduates to think of their coursework as a purely in-class activity, but limiting their philosophical conversations to the lecture hall undermined our central aim of helping our students practice philosophy as a way of life. For this reason, the final PWOL principle of Immersive Assignments allowed our students to extend their skills beyond the classroom.
For our students, this immersive assignment was an off-campus conversation with someone about race and/or gender. Like with their dialogue groups, in preparing for this conversation students created discussion questions that they planned to use to initiate and guide the conversation, questions that were designed to help them understand the other person’s views. After the conversation, students also had the opportunity to reflect on what went well about the conversation along with what they would change moving forward. In this way, students took what they learned in their dialogue groups and applied those lessons to their everyday lives, encouraging them to have conversations with others about challenging topics like race and gender and helping them to relate the ideas they were learning in class to how others think about these concepts. In short, they practiced living out the PWOL emphasis on dialogue, connecting the skills they had learned in the classroom with their peers, friends, and family.
If you are interested in learning more about our class, you can read further about how we were inspired by the PWOL approach in our paper “Philosophical Dialogue for Beginners: Using PWOL Dialogues to Introduce Students to the Philosophy of Race and Gender,” now forthcoming in the journal AAPT Studies in Pedagogy.
Zac Odermatt
Zac Odermatt is an incoming philosophy PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received an MA in philosophy from Florida State University. His research mainly considers virtue and the normativity of ethics through a synthesis of historical and contemporary approaches. He also maintains research interests in transcendental idealism, Arabic philosophy, and metaphilosophy.
Wes Siscoe
Wes Siscoe is a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Florida State University and the Mellon Course Design Coordinator for the Philosophy as a Way of Life Project. He received his PhD from the University of Arizona and has been a visiting researcher at Brown, Notre Dame, and Rutgers. His research revolves around several themes– rationality, language, and virtue – and their importance for accounts of human excellence and achievement.
