When Gustav Klimt unveiled Philosophy at the Vienna Secession in 1900, the painting didn’t attempt to explain philosophy so much as to evoke the experience of engaging with it. A vertical procession of figures moves through shifting light, while a symbolic head occupies its own reflective register. The work gestures less toward tidy resolution than toward the generative processes that precede it: exploration, interpretation, and the gradual formation of thought. Much of philosophy occupies that interval, and the teaching of philosophy perhaps even more so, as students experiment with ideas and frameworks before coherence fully settles.
I’m joining the Professor Reflection Series as a new editor, and I’m looking forward to helping continue the work started by Andrew P. Mills and Samuel Taylor. One thing I’ve appreciated about the series is its insistence that teaching is not merely the delivery of information but also a practice that raises its own questions and problems. The strongest contributions have shown how small decisions—an assignment structure, a discussion format, the way we introduce a text—can shape how students encounter philosophy.
Two themes in particular interest me as I take on this role. The first concerns how students come to experience philosophy as something they can participate in rather than something they merely study. Many of us have seen classrooms where discussion turns into performance or students speak only once they are certain they have the “right” thing to say. I’m interested in reflections on how we design courses, assessments, and discussions so that students have space to think aloud, test partial ideas, and revise their views publicly. That kind of engagement is difficult to build, and I would welcome honest accounts of what has and has not worked.
The second theme concerns the pedagogies of informal spaces surrounding courses. Office hours are the clearest example, but similar forms of pedagogy unfold in email exchanges, brief conversations after class, and online forums. Students often bring their most tentative confusions to those spaces—questions they did not want to raise in front of peers or ideas they have not yet learned how to articulate. I’ve come to think of office hours less as administrative availability and more as micro-seminars in vulnerability, places where philosophy becomes less abstract and more embodied, with stakes that feel surprisingly personal. There is pedagogical value in preserving those spaces as unhurried and resistant to the acceleration that increasingly shapes higher education. I would welcome reflections that take seriously how much teaching happens there and how instructors think about shaping or protecting those spaces.
For contributors interested in writing for the series, I recommend looking at Andrew P. Mills’ introduction to the series along with Samuel Taylor’s editorial post. We will continue asking contributors to (a) identify the particular pedagogical question, difficulty, or objective they were responding to; (b) outline the instructional choice, course design, or strategy they adopted in response; (c) assess how that approach played out—what proved effective, what produced complications, and what remained unresolved; and (d) indicate how, in light of that experience, they would adjust or refine their approach going forward.
One of the strengths of the series has been the range of contexts and approaches represented. Contributors have written from liberal arts colleges, research universities, community colleges, high schools, and programs serving nontraditional students. Recent posts include Jeffrey Watson on teaching in an era of generative AI, Sahar Joakim on making philosophical inquiry resonate in politically saturated classrooms, Peter Finocchiaro on considerations of linguistic justice when teaching writing to non-native English speakers, and Janelle Salisbury on connecting philosophical material to students’ lived experience. The variety has been instructive: different institutional settings generate different challenges and also different solutions.
As for possible directions, a number of issues have been surfacing across institutions that would benefit from careful reflection. For example:
- What approaches have you used to give feedback on philosophical writing in ways that lead to revision?
- What strategies have you used to help students read primary philosophical texts more slowly and attentively, and how has that changed the quality of discussion in your classes?
- What has been your experience with students using generative AI to draft or brainstorm philosophical writing, and how have you adjusted assignment design or evaluation criteria in response to those new capabilities?
- What has been the pedagogical role of office hours in your courses? How have you structured them (or deliberately not structured them), and what kinds of conversations emerged that were not possible in the classroom?
- What methods have you found effective for reducing the “performance anxiety” of speaking in philosophy classes, and what has that done to the range of voices you hear in the room?
- Have you noticed that students articulate different kinds of questions or worries over email, after class, or in online platforms than they do in formal discussion?
- How have you handled philosophical topics that students find personally charged or sensitive (e.g., death, trauma, identity, discrimination)?
- Have you tried incorporating oral exams, mini-defenses, or viva-style components into philosophy courses, and what did those formats reveal about student understanding that written work did not?
One of the striking things about Klimt’s Philosophy is how much interpretive work it leaves to the viewer. The painting supplies figures, symbols, and relations, but coherence emerges only through the viewer’s effort to connect them. Teaching philosophy often operates in a similar register. Much of what we learn about how to teach well is discovered under local conditions—tested in a particular classroom, with a particular group of students, under particular constraints—and it rarely travels far. A venue like this helps prevent that knowledge from remaining isolated. By writing up what you tried and how it went, you make available pedagogical information to those that would not otherwise have it. If you have been working through a pedagogical problem, whether in course design, assessment, discussion, or the informal spaces around teaching, I hope you’ll consider contributing.
Amartaya Gupta
Amartaya Gupta (Series Editor: Professor Reflection Series) completed his MA in Philosophy at University College London and his research interests include philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, political philosophy, and philosophy of arithmetic. He previously earned a BA in Sanskrit from St. Stephen’s College, where he developed an interest in classical and analytic traditions of philosophy through the study of Indian philosophy. His paper “Possessive Impulses: A Russellian Evaluation of State and Property” received the 2023 Bertrand Russell Society Student Paper Prize (now the David S. Goldman Prize). Before his MA, he worked in the editorial department at Pan Macmillan India, and he now freelances as an editor for Verso Books, Hurst Publishers, and Duke University Press. Outside of philosophy and publishing, he enjoys playing the piano and football.
