One common justification for it is that doing philosophy helps one develop keen argumentative and analytical skills, and up to a point I agree. The thinking skills philosophy helps inculcate are invaluable, and I try to orient my teaching in a way that will help students develop these skills. In recitation I encourage them to formulate objections to the theories we are discussing and have them debate one another. However, good thinking skills are not unique to philosophy. Every course and concentration should encourage students to think clearly, logically, and with an eye to their evidence. Yet I think that philosophical questions are in themselves worthy of study. They are more than an efficient way to hone one’s wits for the LSAT.

My conviction is that philosophy matters, that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. My goal in teaching is to help students to see the importance of big ideas. So the challenge that forms the center of my teaching philosophy is: how do I motivate my students to take philosophy seriously when it is always so abstract and frequently paradoxical? Essentially my answer is: make it real, make it matter, and make it fun.

There are several things I do to try to make philosophy more tangible and approachable. I never present a definition or complicated formulation without also providing examples, and I ask my students to contribute their own examples so that they can see how a theory applies to reality rather than just tossing around jargon. I also try to present the connections between philosophy and the rest of human culture. For example, when students in my Intro to Ethics (Phil 002) recitation had to write an assignment on cultural relativism and the myth of the ‘white man’s burden’ I brought them copies of Rudyard Kipling’s infamous poem “The White Man’s Burden” which introduced the term. Later, when we covered the Republic, I summarized Athens’ political and social crises in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE which motivated Plato’s social theory.

Similarly, in Evolution of Scientific Thought (Phil 025), a pilot course I helped Professor Michael Weisberg develop, we cover several core issues in the philosophy of science as they bear on the history of western science. Rather than just throwing out the question of “is it sufficient for a scientific theory to give good empirical predictions?” we discussed how in the early 16th century the Ptolemaic geocentric theory and the early Copernican theory gave equally accurate predictions of the locations of planets. We then asked our students if there were any considerations besides predictive adequacy which favored the heliocentric model. Thus, an otherwise esoteric question became the difference between a true and a false world system. I hope this helps students to see that the theories we are discussing have a life beyond the bookshelf. They influenced and were influenced by the world around them.

But it’s not enough to show students that philosophy affects the real world; I want them to see that philosophy matters for them. To that end, I try to relate the issues we discuss to the lives they are living. When a junior in Intro. to Ethics told me about her plans to live and work abroad I asked her to consider how she would relate the views she had expressed in her paper on cultural relativism to the way she would adjust to living in a different culture. Would she accept those practices different from her own? If she judged them to be worse would she try to change them? I did not push her one way or the other; I just wanted her to see that the ideas she was studying could be applied to her own life.

Ethical questions such as “how should I live my life” have obvious practical significance, but it is also possible to motivate more theoretical subjects for students. For instance, in Phil. 025 I have two brilliant physics students who started the course with opposite views about how to conduct scientific research. One expressed allegiance to a general sort of Pythagoreanism; he thought that mathematics revealed the basic truths of nature and that physics could be advanced primarily through the development of its formalisms. But there was an ambiguity in his thought. In a series of discussions in and out of class, we distinguished the view that mathematics accurately represents nature from the view that mathematical harmony is the order in nature. He recognized that the properties of a formal system of representation can differ from the object it represents (e.g. the word ‘unostentatious’ is very ostentatious). He was also moved by historical accounts of theories that were mathematically valid but posited false physical mechanisms. He gained a much greater appreciation for the limits of a purely symbolic, mathematical method. He even raised some anti-Pythagorean objections to superstring theorist Brian Greene when he met him at Penn last week.

The other student began the course saying that she was a thorough-going “experimentalist” and empiricist, yet in discussing Bacon’s naïve empiricism she came to recognize the important and inextricable role of theory in guiding observations and interpreting experimental results. She saw that she needed a more sophisticated account of the relation between observation and theory, and to gain new ideas she has started to voraciously read great works in the philosophy of science. Each of them, I think, has profited from studying philosophy and has developed a more nuanced and sophisticated view of scientific research. I hope that their careers as scientists will benefit from this greatly.

Additionally, I realize that philosophy is a daunting subject, so I do everything I can to help my students stay interested in and on top of the material. I fill my recitations with a lot of humor because I know that if I can make recitation fun then students will show up, participate, and come to office hours. I also try to make myself extremely available by holding review sessions for exams (even if I am the only TA in a course to do so) and meeting with students to discuss drafts of their papers. Sometimes I discuss papers for other philosophy courses with past and current students. Because questions such as “what is justice?” and “am I responsible for my actions?” are so vital, I think that anything I can do to help my students grapple with them is something that I ought to do. Teaching philosophy is a great responsibility, but for me it’s also labor of love and a damn good time. After all, there are few things I would rather be doing than discussing philosophy.

Francis Bacon said, ‘Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.’ Reformulated, this wonderful remark states my philosophy of teaching: ‘Philosophy, when superficially discussed, induces apathy; when passionately taught, it evokes enthusiasm.’