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?
{ 0 comments… add one now }