I\u2019ve been teaching philosophy, an honors elective taken mainly by seniors, for the past twenty-six years at a suburban high school outside Chicago. The class is organized topically around a set of perennial questions in ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. I encourage conversation and debate in my classroom, but I also ask students to work out their ideas independently in writing assignments. The kinds of writing I assign reflect my own thinking about what it means to do philosophy. Followed by each dimension of philosophy, I sketch strategies for teacher assessment and student exploration through writing. I hope this blog sparks a conversation about how we feature writing in philosophy instruction.<\/p>\n
Philosophy is a reflective activity<\/em><\/strong> that invites students to make explicit their fundamental assumptions and beliefs. Self-reflection should take the further backward step of inspecting these assumptions and beliefs for internal coherence and consistency. Students also should discern implications of their beliefs, including any \u201cbullets\u201d they need to bite for the sake of consistency. And they should investigate sources of inconsistency and possibilities for revising their beliefs.<\/p>\n Questionnaires or surveys can be effective in helping students clarify their basic beliefs and inspect them for internal coherence and consistency. For example, \u201cBattleground God,\u201d a questionnaire on the TPM Online’s website<\/a>, enables students to examine their beliefs on the rationality of religious belief. Journal entries create opportunities for students to explore a question in writing before being introduced to formal arguments in assigned readings or class discussion. For example, before discussing the merit of ethical relativism, students might be asked to respond in their journal to the question whether disagreement about right and wrong is comparable to disagreement about the shape of the earth. They also might revisit the same question at the end of a unit to reflect upon changes in their thinking.<\/p>\n Philosophy is at least partly a matter of thinking about thinking<\/em><\/strong>, or more specifically, thinking about arguments. Before students are in a position to appraise an argument, they must understand and master it. What is the structure of the argument? What are its background assumptions? What are its implications for the philosophical question(s) under consideration? I ask students to annotate an assigned reading and to identify the central argument in preparation for class. I then divide the class into groups and ask each group to reach consensus and write their version of the central argument on the board. The argument must be concise and represented as a set of propositions that includes premises and conclusion. The class then discusses which arguments on the board approximate the author\u2019s intended argument in the reading. Examples include Nagel\u2019s \u201cWhat Is It Like to Be a Bat\u201d as an argument against identity theory, Descartes\u2019 dream and conceivability arguments in the Meditations<\/em>, and Mackie on the paradox of omnipotence.<\/p>\n Early in each unit, I hand out a set of study questions on the readings. We often refer to the questions in class. I then select some of the study questions for an in-class essay exam. For example, I might divide an exam on free will into three sections, each one representing a major position on the question (e.g., hard determinism, compatiblism, libertarianism). Students select one question from each set. Here are two sample questions: (1) Explain van Inwagen\u2019s Principle and its appeal to \u201cuntouchable facts.\u201d How does the Principle justify hard determinism and challenge classical compatiblism? (2) How is the personal<\/em> predicament of Dostoevsky\u2019s Underground Man attributable to the philosophical<\/em> problem of free will and determinism?\u00a0Why does he care deeply about whether he has free will? So, study questions guide reading, discussion, and review; and students\u2019 mastery of the questions is assessed on the in-class essays.<\/p>\n Philosophy also engages arguments by evaluating them<\/em><\/strong>. Once students have demonstrated a firm grasp of an argument, we expect them to analyze and appraise it. What objections might be raised? How would the argument handle counter-examples? Where does the argument suffer from a lack of clarity, consistency, or plausibility? How might the argument answer objections? How might it be revised or strengthened to meet objections? Does an alternative argument better defend the same position? For example, in the ethics unit I introduce plausibility, consistency, justification, and usefulness as criteria. After giving them a model by applying the criteria to Mill\u2019s utilitarianism, I ask them to write an essay in which they apply the criteria to another ethical theory (e.g., Kant\u2019s deontological ethics, Aristotle\u2019s teleological ethics; Wilson and Pinker\u2019s sociobiology).<\/p>\n As an alternative to a thesis-based question, I ask students to write a dialogue representing major positions on an issue (e.g., memory, body, soul as candidates for personal identity). The dialogue invites students to probe and challenge competing arguments from their respective points of view. I also assign essay questions that ask students to compare two philosophers who represent opposing points of view and to show why one philosopher\u2019s position is more defensible than the other (e.g., Hick and Mackie on the problem of evil, Rawls and Nozick on distributive justice).<\/p>\n Philosophical reasoning also calls for the creative application <\/em><\/strong>of philosophical concepts and theories to contemporary issues, to works of art, to problems and puzzles. I ask students to analyze a film for its philosophical themes or as a thought experiment that tests philosophical arguments they have studied. Here are a few examples: How does the popular film \u201cGroundhog Day\u201d dramatize Aristotle\u2019s views on virtuous character and friendship? How does \u201cCrimes and Misdemeanors\u201d dramatize Plato\u2019s ring of Gyges? Does the thought experiment of Leondard\u2019s condition in \u201cMemento\u201d reinforce the views of Parfit, Locke, or Hume on personal identity?<\/p>\n I also ask students to apply competing views on distributive justice to the issue of affirmative action and Aristotle\u2019s theory of human flourishing to the ethics of genetic enhancement. Students apply competing views on free will to the case of someone who committed brutal crimes as an adult and suffered terrible abuse as a child. They also apply act utilitarian, rule utilitarian, and Kantian procedures to cases in cases in bioethics.<\/p>\n I do think the above strategy can constrain students who are more eager to investigate a question on their own than to demonstrate that they can deftly use the tools of others. That\u2019s why the best questions are often open-ended and invite students\u2019 independent thinking. At the same time, such questions needs to be framed carefully and should encourage students to draw judiciously from the arguments and readings they have encountered in the unit. Here is a good example drawn from a student essay competition on the Hi Phi<\/em> website<\/a> at University of Virginia:<\/p>\n \u201cThink about all the physical and psychological changes a person goes through from birth to adulthood. It is not too much of a stretch to say that everything<\/em> important about you\u2014how you look, how you act, what kinds of things you like, how you spend your time, and so on\u2014changes throughout your life. What, then, makes someone who is, say, age 17, the same<\/em> person<\/em> as at, say, age 3? Is it the continuity of memories, the same, the same brain, the judgment of friends or elders, the continuity of desires? Each of these answers has a potential serious problem\u2014or problems\u2014associated with it. Your task is to consider carefully the question, what makes a person the same<\/em> person at different stages of their life?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I look forward to learning about how writing is inscribed in the teaching of pre-college philosophy in your classroom. And I\u2019m eager to read both supportive and critical responses to how it is featured in mine.<\/p>\n