Teaching Philosophy (pun intended)

My approach to teaching is rooted in my experience as a student (and yes, that is little me up there at the piano, studious from the get-go). I began as an undergraduate with the hope of getting a Ph.D. and becoming a professor. From the start, then, I paid attention not only to the substance of what I was learning, but also to how I was learning it. I quickly came to appreciate that teaching is an art form unto itself. Indeed, I came to realize more and more as I progressed through my studies that it is an art form with numerous modalities, from huge classrooms to seminars to discussion sections to one-on-one advising and informal mentoring, each with its own challenges and measures of success. I try in all my teaching to emulate what I have found to be effective and avoid what I have found to be ineffective.

In the classroom, the best teacher I ever had was Nick Smith at the University of New Hampshire. In all of his classes that I attended, Nick fostered an atmosphere of communal exploration, one in which even the shyest might speak and everyone’s voice carries equal weight. From him I learned the importance of making the ideas being conveyed relevant, even vital, to students. I learned the importance of putting in time, how positively students respond to a professor who demonstrates genuine care for them, their work, and their experiences. I also learned how to act as a sort of ringmaster, leading and following by turns so that everyone in the room remains involved even as a great deal is accomplished and conveyed. Most importantly, perhaps, I learned from Nick that a philosophy course can be life-changing.

The best advisor and mentor I ever had was David Hiley, also at the University of New Hampshire. I don't think he would mind me saying that, in the classroom, I found him too laid back and, as a result, insufficiently assertive. But it is this very quality that made him such an effective advisor. It was because of him that my thinking turned toward ancient skepticism, which has occupied me ever since. What made him remarkable in my experience was the extent to which he treated me as a partner in a shared enterprise. He somehow made it seem as if the intellectual playing field were level between us despite that it clearly and demonstrably was not. Never again has being taught assumed for me so completely the appearance of personal epiphany. From Hiley I learned the value in starting fresh with a topic or text, especially when working with students closely or one-on-one.

For example, I’ve read the opening chapters of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism countless times, yet I’ve never taught them the same way twice, for the material takes on different shapes depending on the interests and backgrounds of the students I’m working with. Given the seemingly endless ambiguities of interpretation, I consider all philosophy, even when understood as a body of existing work, to be up for grabs. As Kant put it, “where is [philosophy], who has possession of it, and by what can it be recognized?”

One can only learn to philosophize, i.e., to exercise the talent of reason in prosecuting its general principles in certain experiments that come to hand, but always with the reservation of the right of reason to investigate the sources of these principles themselves and to confirm or reject them. (Critique of Pure Reason, A838/B866)

When I teach, I try as much as possible to treat philosophical topics and texts as invitations to philosophize rather than as rigid philosophies to be broken down and digested.

This does not, of course, preclude me from conveying my own theories and interpretations. When teaching, my voice is usually the one most heard, partly because I will always have a view of my own, but also because I strive to act as a conduit for the views of my students, amplifying and clarifying and interrogating them. What I try above all not to do is to leave my students hanging—an experience I know well. All of the most pedagogically ineffective courses I took as a student were discussion-based seminars that were attended by students whose familiarity with the course material or its context varied widely.

What I learned from these classes is that productive discussion is all but impossible in the absence of a shared understanding of the topic. As a teacher, I come prepared to teach, even should no one in attendance have done the reading. This requires constant preparation, which for me means above all immersing myself in the material with an eye toward teaching it. I’m sure I’m not alone in noticing a difference between reading a text for individual purposes and reading it to teach. I always get the most out of the latter. I find that my perspective on a text expands when I read it for teaching purposes, as if a part of me is encountering even the most familiar text for the first time.

David Hume wrote, “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” Applied to my teaching, I take this to mean: strive to be not so much a ‘professor’ or a ‘philosopher’ as simply a human being among human beings. Get people talking; get them comfortable. Try, as I like to say, ‘to put the air back into the room.’Philosophizing is a reflection of and upon our shared human condition: it is open to all, it can bar no questions at the gate, and it suffers no despotic rule. To pursue philosophy in anything other than an entirely inclusive way is, it seems to me, to contravene the very spirit of philosophy itself.