I taught this course as a large lecture course with 300 students, most of whom were there to complete General Education requirements, at UC Santa Cruz in Fall of 2024. UC Santa Cruz is a large public university that serves a diverse student body, including many first-gen, Latinx, and community college transfer students. The course included both lectures and weekly sections, both of which were mandatory.
I developed this syllabus by improving on a previous, semester-long asynchronous online introduction to philosophy course I had taught at Rutgers. It is inspired by omnivorously browsing others’ syllabi made available online. Consider this a plea to share more of your own teaching materials—they really are extremely useful to colleagues!
My main goals in this course were (1) to provide an entry-way to enjoying philosophy (and thinking more generally) for students with diverse interests and backgrounds, by selecting topics and readings that can appeal to different profiles, and (2) to scaffold student learning of central philosophical skills, such as careful reading, the basics of arguments, understanding and testing out definitions, developing objections, writing outlines, and the like.
Such skills get explicitly taught too rarely, leaving unaddressed previous educational inequalities between students. To correct this, lectures included a regular “tools corner” where we went over such skills explicitly, as well as short assignments isolating these skills and a scaffolded final paper following The Nguyen’s Writing Workshop sequence. This scaffolded structure—short writing assignments isolating specific skills, leading up to an outline, final draft, and final paper—works even better in upper division courses, in my experience, where the last short assignment has students propose three questions which I help them improve.
My favorite feature of this syllabus is how fast-paced and (in my totally unbiased perspective) fun the topics, ideas, and arguments are, while simultaneously addressing some of the most perennial philosophical questions. The syllabus zig-zags across a wide range of topics that are relevant to daily life as well as to deep philosophical anxieties: from echo chambers, deepfakes, and epistemic dependence to the role of anger and assessing emotions more generally, via thinking about what gaslighting and bullshit are, as well as gender and race and the problems with biological conceptions of these, among others.
If you consider adapting this for your purposes, you can find all the slides I used here. There are also some changes I would implement if I were to teach this course. The week on elections may make less sense if there isn’t a major election going on, and I would consider giving students a break and not assigning a reading for the paradox of voting and just discussing it in class.
More substantively, part of the hope in running in-section sessions in which students workshopped outlines as drafts was to harness the fear of embarrassment to reduce the temptation to just use ChatGPT or other AI. But I confess that this was only partially successful, with a number of students still handing in fully AI-generated work. In the future, I will begrudgingly incorporate in-class exams, which I am coming to think have the additional advantage of making students look at the material more closely, learn key concepts, and grasp central arguments.
The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Cara S. Greene via cara.greene@coloradocollege.edu, or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik via smrutipriya23@gmail.com with potential submissions.
Carolina Flores
Carolina Flores is assistant professor of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. They write about evidence-resistance, the dynamics of belief revision, and social identities. Their work has been published in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, and Synthese, among other places, including public-facing venues. You can read more about their work and find more teaching materials at www.carolinaflores.org.
