I’m Daniel Drucker, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m presenting the second half of a two-semester course that I started teaching, the second part of an “institutional” course. The University of Texas at Austin has an honors college, Plan II, where there are a lot of very able students who are interested in having a broad liberal arts undergraduate curriculum in a unified cohort. Early on, they began to require students to take a yearlong introduction to philosophy, broadly divided into a more theoretical part centered around knowledge and a more ethical part. It has an interesting name, “Problems of Knowledge and Valuation.” Many of my colleagues teach or have taught it, but I think my late colleague Paul Woodruff was particularly attached to it and innovated in how to teach it. It’s a really flexible mandate, so it’s a fun class to make your own. That’s why I decided to do it.
My overarching goal was to show them it was fun and fulfilling to think seriously and rigorously about topics that are often every day, abstract, and general. Philosophical questions are really interesting, but you have to be honest with people that they’re hard but repay hard thinking. It’s really tough to get students to believe you about that, but I wanted to pick readings and ideas that would go some way of showing them. Beyond that, I wanted them to get used to thinking about how accounts of things in general work, what examples and counterexamples are for, what arguments are for and how objections work, and how to set about thinking about the basic questions that frame different areas of inquiry and where philosophy is most relevant. I know most of them won’t go on in philosophy, but being thoughtful about the big foundational stuff will, I hope, be useful and fun to them as they live their lives. I also wanted to help them organize their thoughts and discussions better.
With that in mind, then, I decided to base the course around one of my favorite books of philosophy, Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere. I love the book because of its relentless thoughtfulness: as he discusses each of the ultra-traditional topics that he discusses (the relation between mind and body, skepticism, free will, moral realism, consequentialism and deontology, and death and the meaning of life), he models both good argumentation but also a clear understanding of the limits of argumentation. To be blunt, he’s really good at being dissatisfied with partial answers to these questions. Nagel is also typically the hardest author I assign, which means I have to be very thorough in explaining him. Handouts take on a very large importance. But I think it’s worthwhile to have students read challenging things, since they learn a lot in the process and, I think, come to see that they really can read and engage with this kind of thinking in ways they might not have initially realized. (Students have actually told me that!) The hope, then, is that Nagel will make them both better readers and less satisfied with easy answers.
The course readings are built around Nagel. In this second half, which is about ethics and political philosophy primarily, we start with one of my other favorite texts, Plato’s Gorgias, as a way of introducing the main themes of the course: what is it to have moral knowledge? Who really has your best interests at heart, and what even are your interests? What’s the relation between valuing and desiring? Is being a good person the most important thing? Who is a good politician? From there, we have a section on metaethics centered on the first two books of the Nicomachean Ethics and classic work by Mackie; a section on first-order ethics with readings from Singer, Foot, and Thomson; a section on the limits of the moral using Wolf and Williams; and a section on friendship and politics with readings from the last few books of the Nicomachean Ethics and Elizabeth Anderson. My students like this last section best, I think, and also the Gorgias.
Though I’m really trying to find the right mix of things, I’m a bit old-fashioned when it comes to the pedagogical methods I use. The most important thing I’ve come to do is this: I write very thorough handouts where I try to explain everything I find most interesting and important in what we read, and I work hard to make it obviously worth their time to think through, to get clear on. So, in teaching the Gorgias, for example, I make sure to highlight how incredible the consequences are of what Socrates is saying for everyday life, for example, that the victims of oppression are better off than the oppressors, or that we ought to turn our family members in when they commit a bad crime, for the family member’s own sake. These are provocative, fascinating ideas, but they have to be highlighted. I also try to make my exams interesting experiences: I work hard to make my exam questions interesting ways to get new angles on the material. ChatGPT has forced me to put more of an emphasis on exams, so I’m still trying to get them right, given what I want the class to be.
More generally, I give students hard reading and ideas but grade and test relatively lightly. That, I hope, keeps them challenged without penalizing them for my ambitions with the course. I’m always working on this balance, though.
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