In the spring, I’ll be teaching the second semester of our philosophy grad program’s first-year seminar. This is the seminar all PhD students in the philosophy department take together as a cohort during their first year in the program. The fall semester of the seminar typically leans towards the metaphysics and epistemology side of philosophy, while the spring semester leans toward the ethics and political side. (We recognize that this isn’t really a defensible way to think about joints within the discipline, but the content delivery aspect of the seminar isn’t a priority, and we think of the categories as flexible depending on who’s teaching it. So, it’s a serviceable organizing principle for our purposes.) There’s a separate year-long workshop on pedagogy, so the first-year seminar doesn’t need to include that content, though of course it can.
I took a class like this as a PhD student, and I know that many other philosophy grad programs have them. This must be true outside of philosophy, too. I’m interested in hearing from people about how they’ve experienced courses like this, whether from the student side or from the teacher side or both. It seems to me that there are so many valuable things that a class like this might aim to accomplish, and a wide range of ways it might be put together to realize combinations of aims.
Here are the things I’m planning to prioritize.
First, I want the class to include opportunities for grads to practice learning with and from each other, with relatively light teacherly oversight. Here I include opportunities for them to grow their sense of responsibility for their own and each others’ learning, to grow their general skills of attentiveness to other members of a seminar community, and just to experience the fun it can be to lose oneself, with others, in philosophy. So, for instance, I want them to feel as accomplished when they help two classmates better see what’s at stake in an argument they’re having, as they do when they offer a deep, tough critique of an article they’ve read.
Second, I want the class to help them appreciate how broad is the range of questions toward which we can fruitfully direct philosophical thinking.
Third, I want to dispel the seeming obviousness of some philosophical commitments that apparently seem obvious right now. For instance, in political philosophy, there’s a critique of so-called “ideal theory” that (in my experience) seems to many students to obviously win the argument against the worth of ideal theorizing. There’s this fun and powerful moment in a paper by Charles Mills where he asks readers to imagine having come to normative political philosophy fresh and learning that people are thinking about justice by first asking what an ideally just society would look like: “Forget, in other words, all the articles and monographs and introductory texts you have read over the years that may have socialized you into thinking that this is how normative theory should be done…. Wouldn’t your spontaneous reaction be: How in God’s name could anybody think that this is the appropriate way to do ethics?” And: “Why should anyone think that abstaining from theorizing about oppression and its consequences is the best way to bring about an end to oppression? Isn’t this, on the face of it, just completely implausible?” I encounter people quoting this passage everywhere, and I get it—it does compel attention. But of course, the fact that something would seem strange to someone who hasn’t yet considered arguments for or against it doesn’t settle the matter against it. There are arguments in both directions, and a “how in god’s name” isn’t dispositive, however much we delight in its power and brilliance and whatever we ultimately think about the substance of the issue. This is just one example; broadly, I like the idea of using a class like this to draw students into engagement with arguments for and against the seeming obviousnesses of their moment.
Finally, I want to use the class as an opportunity for the students to get to know some of the other faculty in the department. I think it will be helpful in all sorts of ways for them to have early experience reading the work of people in the department and discussing it with them.
To these ends, I envision beginning discussion each week in advance of our in-person meeting, with students engaging together on the class online discussion board, primarily in the form of workshopping discussion questions and objections. For most sessions, roughly each 90 minutes will be headed with a ten-to-fifteen-minute student presentations in which they’re tasked with reconstructing and situating one contained argument, teeing up the discussion questions supplied in advance by others and priming us to consider candidate responses and defenses on behalf of the authors. Most of the subsequent discussion will proceed through self-moderation (which of course we’ll need to practice before we can do it effectively). Other sessions will feature visitors from within the department whose work we’ll have read in advance (and for whom we’ll have workshopped questions in advance). Beyond the short argument presentations and discussion board participation, students’ work will consist in a short-paper-and-rewrite series, which will include a peer workshopping component. For the weeks without a departmental guest, readings have been selected not to be comprehensive or to represent a canon, but to show the breadth of (roughly) normative philosophy, to dispel apparent obviousnesses, and just to give opportunity to enjoy studying good and interesting philosophical work together.
Those are four goals I’ve tentatively adopted out of many worthy possibilities. What was/is your first-year cohort class like? What would you try to accomplish with a class like this? How would you do it? Are there other/better ways to accomplish what I’m after?
{ 11 comments }
Matt 11.01.24 at 10:10 pm
That sounds like a nice class. I took something similar at Penn, many years ago now, taught by Jim Ross. He was, at least, an eclectic guy. The official purpose of the class was to carefully read some classics of analytic philosophy and work on discussing and writing about them. (We had several short-ish papers in the class.) Our official texts were McDowell’s Mind and World, Dummett’s Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Goodman’s Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Sellar’s Empiricism & the Philosophy of Mind, and Brandom’s Articulating Reasons. Those were all good, but the class also bounced around wildly, with both good and bad results. The good part was the two weeks we unexpectedly spent reading Aristotle’s De Amina, which ended up being my favorite part of the class by far. The point, I guess, is that it might be good to not get too locked in on texts or topics, and to be willing to take up something unexpected if it develops in the course of things.
John Quiggin 11.02.24 at 1:14 am
(Tangential) I was interested by the reference to ideal theory, which I (non-philosopher) associate with Rawls. The criticism made by Mills seems pretty appropriate there.
But how about utilitarianism? Harsanyi’s “impartial observer” justification is pretty much the same as Rawls’ veil of ignorance – the big difference comes from assuming individuals should focus on expected utility rather than maxmin. So, it looks like a kind of ideal theory
On the other hand, utilitarianism is entirely practical. It’s routinely used to answer questions like: is it good policy to set tax rates so as transfer income from (richer) person A to (poorer) person B, given that some of the transfer will be lost along the way.
And responding to criticisms like those of Mills, you can give a utilitarian answer to the question: should an organization fighting oppression adopt non-violence as an organising principle?
I don’t want to argue about the merits (or lack of merits) of utilitarianism in any of these contexts, just to ask how the ideal/non-ideal distinction is supposed to apply.
Michael Kates 11.02.24 at 11:55 am
@John Quiggin
There’s an interesting new article on this from a consequentialist perspective by Andreas Schmidt: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/josp.12586https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/josp.12586
Gina Schouten 11.02.24 at 12:28 pm
I love the idea to “be willing to take up something unexpected if it develops in the course of things”! I will definitely take that advice, and now am kind of hoping that the course might help someone find their De Anima. Will report back!
Gina Schouten 11.02.24 at 12:37 pm
I think people use the distinction in different ways, and I think in criticisms of ideal theory, the distinction is often drawn differently than it is in attempts at doing ideal theory. (And really, I know of very few people who are doing ideal theory right now, but there are many who think it’s valuable to have a well-worked-out version on hand, and so are using aspects of Rawls’s theory to do nonideal theory.)
But as I understand it, as soon as you ask the question about adopting non-violence as an organizing principle in response to oppression, you’re doing non-ideal theory. And what you hope, I’d say, is that your account of utilitarianism (or the difference principle, or whatever) is sufficiently well worked out that you can produce a good answer by invoking that principle. That’s why you needed the fairly well specified principles/ideals of ideal theory, according to Rawls. So that when you turned to the really important questions of nonideal theory, you’d be able to answer them well.
There are lots of objections to that picture, but I’d love to keep talking about the class on this thread, if people are interested in that. Maybe it would be fun to do a future post on ideal and nonideal theory!
LFC 11.02.24 at 2:54 pm
Didn’t go through a philosophy grad program so don’t think I have a lot to contribute here. But if you cross-posted this on Daily Nous (w/ the proprietor’s permission of course), you might get more discussion. Just a thought.
P.s. I am, on the whole, a fan of Rawls, but wd point out that people had been doing “ideal theory” — i.e. thinking about what an ideally just society would look like — for a long time before ToJ was published (even if it had fallen out of fashion among professional philosophers).
Kenny Easwaran 11.02.24 at 9:51 pm
Because I was enrolled in the logic program rather than the philosophy department at Berkeley for my PhD, I had been under the impression I wouldn’t be allowed in the first-year cohort class, so I didn’t take it. (I later learned that I would have been welcome.)
But it seems to me that one central question for this sort of class concerns the question of whether one wants to create an official canon of texts that students are expected to have exposure to, or to challenge such an idea, and even if one wants to challenge such an idea, there’s a question of whether it’s still valuable to have a standardized setting where students get exposure to certain works that others in their professional life will assume they have encountered. For better or worse, this first-year class is going to create a shared set of readings for the students in the program (at least, stratified by year) and it’s worth thinking about what one does or doesn’t want to include in that (regardless of how it fits with other thematic elements).
I also think one of the potentially valuable features of such a class is a that it provides a chance for students to do many shorter writing assignments, focusing on particular writing skills, and getting explicit feedback on it.
Harry 11.03.24 at 3:05 pm
I did my PhD at USC, before USC had become what it now is. I don’t think much thought was given to learning outcomes for the first semester seminar (which I took in the second year, with late Geoff Joseph, because I arrived in the spring). But it was very much the shared set of readings model that Kenny suggests: Frege through, believe it or not, Feyerabend, via Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine and Lakatos (no Popper, and we did NOT read Against Method, but Feyerabend’s earlier papers, which are terrific). I don’t think we read Putnam or Davidson because they were contemporary, so we were expected to (and did) read them in other classes. There was no normative/value theory, which was fine by me as I had no interest in that, and is still fine by me for exactly the opposite reason (it’s what I ended up doing, and I’m grateful for the background I have in 20th century analytic). But probably not the right way to do things.
Fergus 11.04.24 at 9:30 am
I took what was called the “pro-seminar” at the beginning of the BPhil in Oxford. It is quite different from what others are describing, probably largely for reasons about the general structure of the grad program (for example, it is much shorter, only eight weeks.) But I think there are some interesting things about it to reflect on.
We didn’t have one seminar for the whole cohort, it was split into small groups with different professors. There was very substantial variation in what we read according to which group you were in, so clearly the seminar was not trying to play the role of establishing a common base of knowledge/familiarity for all of us
We only read one paper each week. The discussion was not necessarily limited to a discussion of the paper, but it was not expected or encouraged that we were bringing in insights or arguments from other bits of philosophy we’d read.
One person would present and lead discussion with the group. This was also the case for many (but not all) of the ‘standard’ seminars, but it was a big point of transition for many people compared to their undergrad study, so giving an opportunity to practise that in a relatively low key setting (not a big group, just one paper, no pretence to be getting to the bottom of things) was I think part of the point.
Half the seminars were ‘practical’ philosophy and half ‘theoretical’ (the same split OP describes, and I don’t think anybody had your misgivings about it!) My group for the ‘practical’ segment read essentially one article each about contractualism, Kantian ethics, virtue theory and egalitarianism, so I think it’s fair to say that the specific content was part of the purpose in those readings. In contrast the professor who took our ‘theoretical’ sessions was openly focused on using the readings and discussions to develop certain skills, rather than exposing us to key ideas. For example we read a Judith Jarvis Thomson article about mereology, which I think (but this was never my area)is fairly idiosyncratic and not what you’d set as an introduction to that topic. At the end of the discussion our professor told us that the point of doing this reading was to talk about and get some experience with recognising and handling a paper that (in his view!) used a very high level of formalism to conceal weak points in the argument. As someone with no interest in mereology or really much in metaphysics more broadly, that probably was a lot more valuable to me than a survey would have been.
Gina Schouten 11.04.24 at 3:54 pm
Kenny, I completely agree with you about the value of intensive feedback on shortish writing assignments.
I also agree that we have to think about “the canon” questions in the context of what students will be expected to have studied when they encounter other people in their future professional lives. But I’m inclined to think that’s an issue better addressed in our thinking about broad questions of curriculum and course requirements for a grad program. (Or, at least, I’m inclined to think that when the department passes around the teaching of the first-year class and doesn’t have a uniform approach to teaching it, which might be a sub-optimal setup.)
But I’m not all that confident of that judgment, so appreciate you weighing in that you think it’s a pertinent question for this context, too. I definitely think the kind of class Harry describes (and the kind Fergus had on the “practical” side) will prepare students better along this dimension than the kind of class I describe. But maybe the kind of class I have in mind for the spring (and the kind Fergus had on the “theoretical” side) has advantages. One takeaway from this discussion for me is that we should consider the question I raised in the context of what the other curricular components are doing for students in the program.
Brienne 11.07.24 at 5:28 am
Content flexibility aside, the proseminars I’ve taken felt just like regular seminars — I had to read, write, and argue a lot. I loved the wide range of topics, questions, and areas of philosophy so they were often pretty fun or interesting. That said, the beauty of an ideal proseminar, for me, is the opportunity for community building and community care. I was and still am a philosophy fanatic so I truly wanted to have fun with and excel at the reading/writing/arguing and at the same time, I felt like I could not escape the pressure to perform and compete.
The proseminar I wanted and needed would have regularly included intentional, community chats. I needed just a little bit of space and time (even just 15 minutes!) each week to drop my defenses, to breathe, to learn about and humanize my colleagues, and to reflect on how things are going. It can make such a huge difference for people to have scheduled time for totally open discussion about life, the program, the university, the field, and philosophy; and it specifically helps that there is no pre-read required!
If I were to develop a proseminar, I’d ask myself how the proseminar I’m developing differs from a regular or typical seminar (aside from content variability). I’d also try to get clear on whether and how there’s variability in the learning outcomes between the two types of seminars.
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