Your one-stop Intro to Philosophy shop

Update: This site has been given an attractive redesign and is now edited by Erin Tarver.

Villanova's John Immerwahr, an ISW reader and enthusiast, has alerted me to his attractive new website, Teach Philosophy 101. As its name suggests, Tø101 is an open source collection of materials and resources for teaching to Introduction to Philosophy, with good stuff both for those new to the special challenges of Intro and those looking to refresh or revamp their Intro courses. John's site is nicely organized and he's looking for other links and resources related to teaching Intro. I'd encourage everyone to head over and check it out.

Intro courses specifically for majors?

My department is revamping its curriculum and is considering adding an intro course specifically for philosophy majors. (This need not be an 'intro' course on either the historical survey or topical smorgasbord model — we'd be open to a seminar for new majors, for instance.) Does anyone out there know of departments that have done this, and what the courses look like?

Thanks!

The importance of teaching: "Majoring in the professor"

There are plenty of reasons why philosophers should care about the quality of their teaching. There are narrowly prudential reasons obviously. Your ability to find or retain academic employment can depend on the quality of your teaching. There are also broadly prudential reasons too. Treating teaching as a worthwhile and engaging endeavor makes it possible for teaching (which, let's face it, is (a) what earns most of us our pay, and (b) what we spend the majority of our professional hours attending to) to be a central and rewarding part of your professional identity.

But there are also collective reasons to teach effectively. This piece in the IHE provides evidence for what I suspect most university faculty already notice: Students' academic interests are malleable, and the discipline they choose to study often turns on the instructor who firsts introduces them to it:

Dead blogging the AAPT, part I

I returned a few days ago from the biennial conference of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT). If you've never attended one of their conferences, I recommend it. The energy and commitment to education you encounter among the AAPT members is remarkable — I have little doubt that our profession would benefit if the typical philosopher had even a fraction of the same energy and commitment to effective teaching.

Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for two of the three main days of the conference. Furthermore, there were usually at least five concurrent sessions in any particular time block, so I obviously saw only a small sample of all the work on teaching that was presented at the conference. 

Nonetheless, I thought I'd post some quick overviews and comments about the sessions I attended, just to provoke thought and encourage you to attend the conference in future years.

Today, I'll describe what I saw on day 1, and I'll post next week about day 2.

Relativism and Psychological Egoism

I've started revamping my Intro to Philosophy syllabus and have decided to tackle the inevitable discussion of relativism and psychological egoism early on by anticipating these objections with some readings.

I thought about using chapters from Snare's The Nature of Moral Thinking but a friend who used Snare in her class said that students found it difficult. I've tentatively settled on Rachels "The Challenge of Cultural Relativism," which appears in many anthologies, and perhaps also his "Humans are not Always Selfish". Someone recommended that I look at chapters from Shafer-Landau Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?

Any other recommendations or thoughts about the aforementioned possibilities?

Learning from each other

Reading Higgins’ book has made me think more about teaching as a practice and our relationship to other educators as a part of that practice, which has been timely, as I recently organized a teacher development workshop for the numerous adjuncts teaching our Introduction to Philosophy course. This is the second time I’ve run such a workshop. I’ve been very preoccupied in running these meetings not to waste the adjuncts’ time and they are not required to attend in order to teach the course. Fortunately, I was able to secure some money from the Office of Undergraduate Education to pay the adjuncts for their time and our department pitched in for food and coffee, but I did feel at the end of the meeting unsure as to whether we should continue to have these every term.

Finding the Mean in Intro to Philosophy

(cross posted at A Ku Indeed)

Without a doubt, of all the courses I have taught, the most frustrating is Introduction to Philosophy (called “Classic Problems in Philosophy” at my college). Every time I teach it I am left thinking that the course was a total bust for one reason or another. I typically then try to fix the problems from the last run and alter the course next time, only to find that the changes fix those problems but create whole set of other new ones. Trying to figure out the course structure for this class that seems to maximally “work” can drive you a bit nuts.

One of the problems with this particular course is that it’s hard to nail down what it is meant to accomplish – or, perhaps, another way to think about it is that it actually needs to accomplish too many things at once because there are so many different types of students in it. On the one hand, there are the prospective majors or minors you would like to attract, so you need to give them enough coverage and depth in particular issues to allow them to more seamlessly integrate into the next higher level of philosophy classes.

On the other hand, it is clear that the course is mostly filled with non-majors. Some students take the course because they think it is interesting, some take it because it fills a distribution requirement, and some take it because it fit their schedule (and some for one or more of those reasons combined). That’s a lot of people with a lot of different agendas. Moreover, it’s also a simple fact that an introduction-level course in philosophy tends to have students with a wide range of abilities, a range that is considerably narrower in upper divisional philosophy courses. Let’s face it, for some students, theoretical abstract thinking of the type done in philosophy comes easy, or is fun. For others, it’s an extremely difficult task that they never seem to really get the hang of, much less enjoy. So you need to challenge the ones with more ability while not leaving the others behind – lost, dispirited, and probably hating philosophy as a subject.

There are so many ways to talk about the difficulties of teaching this class well. In this post, though, I just want to think about a a narrower question, with the above concerns in mind — should you use more content or less? In my previous times teaching this class, I went with a “three problem” format, where I taught a problem a month (lot of detail, obviously). Students who want to major love that approach. The rest: not so much. Moreover, all students are left with the incorrect belief that philosophers really just think about mind, free will, and personal identity, and that’s it.

This time, I swung the pendulum the other way completely. I used a book with 50 problems in it, and we covered a problem a day (36 in total, I think). My original thinking was that this approach would be better for the larger percentage of the class, as we wouldn’t get too deep into any particular issue so philosophy would be more accessible. At the same time, I figured, majors and minors would get a better grasp of the whole field, and I thought that might serve them well later on.

Bzzzzt. Wrong. I think this method is a failure – or at least it was for me teaching it. The future majors and minors were fine. No problem with them – but they are naturally interested in the subject, are willing to overcome frustration, and probably have higher ability levels overall (not that we make them that way — philosophy majors tend to come in with pretty high ACTs). The rest of the class…well, it didn’t work as well for the most part.

Why? I think I honestly underestimated, for one thing, just how difficult these problems really are. The book was simple – each problem discussion was four pages long — so very “coffee table” oriented, content-wise. But once you start talking about these issues, it is clear that each problem is a world unto itself and difficult to get one’s head around in one hour. Each of them requires more than a day to discuss, even if you keep things very, very simple.

Hence the problem: because the problems are so theoretically complicated – even when they are treated simply — many students (I think) felt frustrated and likely developed a feeling of helplessness. With no time to digest each problem, talk about it, reflect on it, and so on, it was like being hit by a mallet every class. “Didn’t understand Wittenstein’s beetle problem? Well, no worries, we’ll be moving on to the Liar’s Paradox next time, where you’ll be similarly thrown for a loop! And then on to the Veil of Perception! Ha ha!” I can only imagine how that approach dispirited many, leading them into total frustration.

This is leading me to think that perhaps the best approach is like virtue – in the mean. Not three problems, but not 36 either. Perhaps one problem a week, using the same book I just used. One way to go about it might be to ask students to choose, at the start of the semester, the 15 problems that seem most interesting out of the 50. From there, you can work on week-long discussions (with extra handouts and reading, perhaps) on those topics. I think this might actually work – not too much content, not too little, a lower level of depth but more time to reflect, digest and think about the problems we are looking at.

Or at least that’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Any ideas? Similar frustrations? Perfect solutions?

Regular intro vs. intro to ethics

The Philosophy Smoker's Mr. Zero reports that students perform better in his introductory ethics courses than in straight intro to philosophy:

I've noticed a general trend in my teaching whereby my Intro Ethics students generally do almost a full letter grade better on average than my regular Intro students (e.g. a B+ to the Intro's B-). I don't think it's because my Ethics class is easier, because the pattern extends to individual test questions concerning material that I include in both classes, such as the meaning of the word 'valid.' 

Teaching Pre-College Philosophy

Is there a future for pre-college philosophy? Over the past few years, I have been heavily invested both professionally and personally in the question of whether an effective, worthwhile, and legitimate philosophy curriculum can be established at the high school level, and whether a philosopher can make a credible, scholarly career out of teaching high school philosophy. I have collected a substantial, however modest, set of research on the subject ranging nearly fifty years across many nations. In what follows and what is to come, I offer both what I have discovered and my reflections on teaching high school philosophy. At best, I hope to convince that teaching high school philosophy is not only credible, worthwhile and legitimate, but also an important part of the scholarly field that should be taken more seriously and given greater attention by professional philosophers. At worst, I hope at least to justify (if only to myself) my own professional choices. I welcome all responses, both positive and negative, but ask that the discussion develop a constructive response to the question.


In 1958 the American Philosophical Association approved a report from the Committee on Philosophy in Education regarding teaching high school philosophy. ["The Teaching of Philosophy in American High Schools" by Douglas N. Morgan and Charner Perry. From Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 32, (1958 -
1959) pp.91-137.] The committee was composed of C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry and R. G. Turnbul. The report refrained from recommending a national curriculum for high school philosophy, but it laid out in detail the pros and cons of teaching philosophy in high school. Of course, philosophy has been taught in many pre-college classrooms for hundreds of years both here in the United States and abroad, but the 1958 document is the first serious, detailed and rigorous attempt in the United States that I know of to investigate the relative merits for students, the field of philosophy, and the citizenry in general of teaching philosophy to pre-college students in both the public and private sectors. What follows is a summary of some of the arguments considered by the committee and my observations fifty years later. (N.B., In some places I have updated the arguments to reflect more the language of our time.)

Arguments for:
1) Philosophy is intrinsically valuable both in its critical evaluation of the meaning of words and concepts, and in its thoughtful reflectiveness that distances the mind from imposing ideologies and assumptions. It is not the content of philosophy that is essential, but the discipline of the mind. Thinking philosophically is a natural good for the human mind and therefore is a good in itself.

2) Many do not go to college, but would benefit from philosophical inquiry before entering into public life. By thinking philosophically, we become better people and better citizens.

3) Philosophical questions arise in us when they do. The brighter students we teach usually already have been pondering philosophical questions from an early age, but it is also the case that even our more average students as well have paused before the distance of the stars, the immensity of it all, and pondered their place in the cosmos. There is no need to attempt to erect philosophical inquiry in our students; the foundations are already firmly laid. If philosophical questions are already present in our younger students, the danger is not leaving those questions unanswered, but having those questions answered by half-truths and dogmatic ideologies. "So much the worse for our culture. We, as philosophers and educators and human beings, have a serious social debt to discharge. Introducing some intelligent young people to philosophy is one way in which we may discharge this debt." (p. 94)

4) Philosophy is intrinsically difficult. Teaching may cut through the diminishing view of the humanities in our culture and reinvigorate high school studies as something more than mere fact-checking, memorization, and petty busy-work. Philosophy promises to bring some scholarly credibility back to teaching high school.

The conclusion drawn from these arguments was that, "[b]ecause philosophy is good, and because some bright pupils want and need work in philosophy, there is a prima facie case in favor of introducing it more widely. It remains to be seen, of course, whether counter-arguments and practical considerations should prevail against this prima facie case." (p. 95) I appreciate the caution of the committee on this point, first and foremost because those of us who teach high school philosophy, it seems to me, are quite passionate about it, and therefore can easily loose our heads over its relative merits. Nevertheless, I find that my academic colleagues at university and professional conferences are more and more intrigued over the level of proficiency possible both in knowledge of the history of philosophy and in thinking and writing philosophically by young high school students. Here are some examples from what I have seen, where I teach students who are bright but average. (I don't mean that disparagingly, but only to point out that my school provides a fertile place for learning for a wider variety of students than "the best". My institution is not among the elite.) In the past five years I have had the privilege of teaching a course in logic, a problems course entitled "Justice and Public Morality", and a regularly offered set of courses in the history of philosophy (Ancient to Medieval and Modern to Contemporary). I have taken students to multiple lectures and conferences at which they both participated and were engaged. One student even had her paper accepted by blind review to the Wisconsin Philosophical Association's annual conference in 2008 (where ironically my paper was rejected --no hard feelings C.P.). In addition, over the past four years the students have invited three guest philosophers to campus for an open lecture. Each time, they filled the lecture hall with energy and questions. This year's guest lecturer is Prof. Charles. W. Mills of Northwestern, who will be giving a lecture entitled "Racial Justice". So I think I am safe in arguing that high school philosophy has many benefits and can be successfully developed more broadly than might be suspected.

There are, however, good arguments against teaching philosophy in high school. No one really argues against it on philosophical grounds, but arguments can be made that such a curriculum is impractical or unwise.

Arguments Against:
1) The students are generally too immature to understand philosophy, and therefore will not benefit from the study. (Similar arguments, I think, can be made of first and second year college students).

2)Philosophy is too emotionally unsettling to be handled by students who naturally lack a certain emotional maturity. High School students are still too emotionally attached to their parent's world-view, and there is not a healthy way for them to facilitate their break from traditional thinking. Learning philosophy can be a culturally and emotionally overturning thing for young students.

3) On a practical level, challenging pre-conceived notions and ideologies can make parents uncomfortable. They might not appreciate their child hearing arguments for skepticism, atheism and moral relativism at such an early age. (I had an interesting experience with this. I have a "No Hunting" sign in my office. A parent came in one morning to talk about his son and saw the sign. He questioned if I was one of those "liberal" teachers who would hold it against his son that he would be missing a day of school in late fall to go hunting. I told him I would only hold it against his son if he came hunting for me. The joke was lost on the parent. I took the point to heart, however, and assured the parent that while my class would be discussing arguments against things the student may believe, I had no intention on changing the student's beliefs or penalizing the student for disagreeing. The parent left unwillingly satisfied.)

4) In-service jealousy over having the brightest students. (I think this is a perk, but it can have its political back drafts.)

5) Curricula become immediately over-crowded with too many courses and not enough space for essential instruction in math and English.

6) Philosophy should not be taught in High School, because high school teachers are too incompetent in the field of philosophy to teach it well enough. Philosophers never entertain a career in high school teaching, but are only interested in publishing and the collegiate life. Without sufficient expertise in the classroom, teaching philosophy in high school is not a worthwhile pursuit.

This last point hits at the heart of my professional goals. Should the current academic culture change? If teaching philosophy, or how to think philosophically, is important in itself, then we need at least some of the brightest minds teaching it at the earliest levels possible. In this post, and in the posts to come, I hope to make the argument that high school is at least as good a place to start as any. Just as we see it being called for in the field of physics, we must get experts who are willing to serve the greater social good, at least for a time, and teach younger students. This could have as added benefits both the positive creation of better teaching in the college classroom once those who teach high school eventually move on to the university sector, and the recreation of philosophy as a more valuable part of our cultural, educational heritage to come.

I welcome your responses and look forward to further discussion.


JMN

An "interdisciplinary" introduction to philosophy course?

Conceptions vary of what philosophy is, or should aspire to, even (or perhaps especially!) among philosophers themselves. One such conception is that philosophy addresses questions and assumptions that are central to, but generally go unexamined, in other disciplines. My purpose here is not to defend this conception of philosophy. Indeed, it strikes me as highly controversial and limited. (Ethics doesn't seem to fit well into this conception of philosophy, for instance).


But I had a thought for what might be an intriguing way to organize an intro to philosophy course: Identify assumptions made in other disciplines and use these as these content objects for the course. So I could imagine you could have a course where:

• Students read the Republic, say, and having had it pointed out to them that Plato's psychology is strongly egoistic, investigate to what degree egoism is assumed in orthodox economics or political science.
• Students read Descartes and other work on skepticism concerning knowledge of the empirical world as a way of considering whether natural science is naively empiricist.
• Students read core sources on free will and determinism and consider to what degree the governing precepts of contemporary biology (or physics, or even sociology) are deterministic.

Better yet, perhaps students could generate the assumptions themselves based on their knowledge of other disciplines. (That might not work if the intro students are mostly freshmen.)

I can see one obvious objection to this approach: It makes philosophy seem like the snarky kid in the corner with no domain of its own, whose job is to hassle other disciplines. Yet on the other hand, I could see two advantages to such an approach: First, it's an ideal way to get guest speakers into your class from other disciplines (and in my view, guest speakers are almost a welcome addition to a class). Second, it seems likely that students will continue to apply the knowledge they acquire in the class because they are likely to go on to study these other disciplines. Teaching philosophy as a 'freestanding' discipline, with its own distinctive problems, encourages students to think of philosophy as something that one does outside of thinking about other things. In contrast, this approach signals that the activity of philosophy arises along side of other intellectual pursuits and is hardly cordoned off from them.

Could such an approach work?

Online Intro To Philosophy Course?

I am wondering if any readers know of any fairly self-contained online Introduction to Philosophy courses. Ideally it would have online readings, perhaps some notes, and is the kind of thing that you could base a real "live" course on that would not require that students buy any books. I have Googled around and checked http://www.teachphilosophy101.org but have not found what I am hoping for. Thanks.

Philosophy via Web-based courses: A NetGener speaks

We've talked a fair bit here at ISW about teaching with technology and teaching the technology-infatuated Millennial generation. Carie Windham's piece about her own learning experiences as a Net Generation student (air warning: it's a PDF) is a pleasant burst of fresh air: A self-aware student thinking about the challenges of teaching and learning in a technological environment. At one point, Windham describes her experience with a Web-based Introduction to Philosophy course:

Philosophy was my nemesis. For five semesters, I cleverly evaded its call—pointedly skipping over the requirement in the dim hope that a registration glitch might fill the spot. But as graduation grew closer, the empty spot hadn’t budged. With a feeling of dread, I decided to budge instead.

As I dutifully joined the roll for Philosophy 205, my only consolation was that Introduction to Philosophy was finally being offered as a Web-based course. I had never tried an entirely “virtual” class before, thinking such endeavors were better suited to distance education students or those with full-time jobs. But philosophy? That could be an exception.

The class was set up with trust in the student. Reading assignments from the text were listed on the course Web site. For grading, we were asked to periodically turn in homework questions from the text and to take occasional quizzes and exams. Every exam was open notes and open book, with a three-hour window of time. The homework was loosely graded.

For the first exam, I read every chapter and highlighted the notes from the study guide. I finished the test in less than thirty minutes. For the second, with the full weight of a sixteen-hour semester upon me, I did the reading but skipped the highlighting. I finished in an hour. For the next exam, with two test experiences under my fingertips, I skipped the reading altogether and simply searched for the answers in the text. The test took nearly two hours. Each time, the grade was the same. By the end of the semester, I couldn’t tell the theory of relativity from utilitarianism. But speed-reading? I was a master.

The professor had assumed, while crafting his course, that putting the content on the Web would give his students more flexibility to shape their own learning experience. We could read at our own pace. We could respond to message threads at our leisure. We could even take tests with the full support of our text and our notes. What he hadn’t expected, perhaps, is that the advent of the Internet and the opportunity of the online classroom had not diminished the need for traditional educational principles such as discipline, engagement, and interaction. Instead, my online course had turned “learning” into exactly what I despised: a one-dimensional exercise in regurgitating facts.

A counterexample was a Web-based course in Latin American history. As in my philosophy course, we were asked to read from an assigned text. But instead of taking quizzes and tests, we were asked to periodically turn in essays and papers. The main difference was that each week we were required to participate in online discussions relevant to our text or to readings found on the Web. Some weeks, we were required to simply post our responses. Some weeks, we were to counter the arguments made by others. Some weeks, we were to evaluate and critique our classmates’ arguments. Though completing the exercises seemed effortless at the time, they held us accountable for the reading and engaged us in the material.

As technology improves and the “virtual classroom” becomes more popular, there is a tendency on the part of institutions and students to turn to online courses. Web-based classes save institutional resources and can accommodate more students. They are more flexible for students who have busy schedules or who commute. But as these examples demonstrate, the online class must be crafted with the same care and expectations as are used in the traditional class.

Students crave interaction with others in the class. The professor must find a way for the students to interact. Discussion forums are a natural solution and can be facilitated by posing questions for students’ response and discussion. The professor must be an active participant and facilitator, however, or students will diminish the importance of the exercises. Another solution is virtual group work. Asking students to collaborate on projects or assignments forces them to meet and exchange ideas with their peers and fulfills their need for group interaction without actually meeting in a classroom.

It’s a common misconception that students take online courses to avoid the rigor and workload of a traditional class. When students choose an online classroom, they still want to be challenged. They still want exploration. And they still want creativity. Net Gen learners are not likely to excel in an environment in which we are simply handed material and expected to recite it back. Most of us log on to online courses because we despise this traditional format of lecture and regurgitate. We feel we learn better in an environment in which we can teach ourselves. The online professor should therefore find ways to offer students a method of exploration and research within the curriculum. ... The simple rule is to engage the students, to move them beyond being mere participants in the class to becoming active learners and discoverers.

I admire how Windham sees that the advantages of Web-based teaching have to balanced with traditional teaching values and techniques: flexibility and discipline, challenge and convenience, rigor and creativity, trust and engagement. I'd be interested to hear reactions from those who've done Web-based teaching — or who are considering moving their teaching in that direction.

Expecting the Old Guys

For me, one of the hardest courses to design is the Introduction to Philosophy course. First of all, it has an impossible premise. There's simply too much philosophy. But that's not what I wanted to write about here. In addition to the topics one chooses, there is also the method of presenting those topics. Since I do a very problem-based type of philosophy, I tend to emphasize the same in my Introduction course. We cover several topics, including free will, personal identity, the mind-body problem, the problem of evil, and the problem of relativism. The last time I taught it, I actually hunted down five dialogues (all from Hackett, it was a cheap course) and used them to lay out the problems. It went pretty well, but I could definitely improve it.

However, the whole time, I was convinced that a good number of students were thinking to themselves, "I signed up for philosophy. Why aren't we reading Plato, Aristotle, or Nietzsche?" That of course leads to the other way of teaching Intro: a more historical approach. Below, I discuss some pros and cons of each approach, with a plea for similar thoughts and experiences from our audience.


The Problem Approach:

• Pros: For me one of the primary benefits of studying philosophy was the liberating method of thought. In fact, I wish that I had learned how to think critically and philosophically before I'd been let anywhere near Descartes, Anselm, and the rest. This method can be easily shown to be applicable in places other than philosophy, allowing the course to make the learning curve shorter on all of his or her other courses. The problems approach can emphasize argumentation, clarity, and precision with slightly more ease than the historical approach. Also, I think the problems approach better prepares students to read papers in contemporary philosophy. If they plan on going on in philosophy, this is an important asset. Finally, because the extra step of interpretation can be minimized in most cases, anybody can jump in and play. You're at most intimidated by tough arguments, rather than towering historical figures.


• Cons: It certainly won't be what most people have expected as a philosophy course at first, and this can turn some students off completely. Also, while it prepares students for contemporary reading, they may be left behind somewhat in a future curriculum that emphasizes historical figures and interpretation. Furthermore, because most contemporary philosophers like to emphasize technical points, it can give students perhaps too narrow a version of all the skills that philosophers employ -- especially interpretation. Also, while it can be very beneficial to learn to think critically, it can be hard to emphasize the kind of imagination that students tend to be able to employ in a more historical introduction. At least if one doesn't like a historical introduction, one can say that one has read some Plato. If you're not into argumentation despite the professor's best efforts, you may report that all you did was "run in circles" all semester.

The historical approach:

• Pros: It's how philosophy has been introduced for hundreds and hundreds of years and they'll be prepared when they hear the names in the future. Students are reading not just this century's mediocre minds, but minds that have stood the test of time and have inspired thousands who never even took a philosophy course. Plenty of people feel the need to pick up Plato at some time in life, but many fewer remember with fondness the day they first read John Perry's dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Also, students studying the great philosophers encounter several issues at once, and are able to mine the text for more without a bad chance of success. The great philosophers inspire readings that draw connections between different topics rather than lasering in on one. Finally, argumentation can be introduced alongside the issues as the great philosophers are offering good arguments. It takes a little more work to explain to students how it works because the arguments are sometimes less explicitly stated, but that difficulty allows students to develop better interpretational skills. Also, from the professorial perspective, it can be considerably more rewarding to gradually become familiar with the older texts than it is to come back to a simple, clear argument every semester.


• Cons: It can be intimidating to study the great, old, white, dead guys, and even more so if you're not old, white, or a guy. Contemporary philosophy has a much more diverse array of voices. Because the philosophies are so developed, it can be harder to play along in the way one can after one has learned simple argumentation. The old guys can certainly leave students in admiration, thinking it would be hard to improve on things rather than sharp and critical of new ideas. Teaching historically also underlines the the idea that a "philosopher" is someone like Plato or Kant rather than the person standing in front of the room teaching them Plato or Kant. It can be much harder to imagine yourself as a philosopher when you're reading Kant than when you're trying to emulate your professor's skill at coming up with counter-examples to numbered arguments. Finally, students can get "stuck" in the history rather than really interacting and coming up with their own ideas and arguments. I've seen more than one person who decided that Spinoza or Marx had it all right, and never felt the need to do any more philosophy, let alone going beyond to the great new frontiers that are being explored today in academic journals.

Ok, so that was way too much. But I'm eager to hear what others have to say about their favorite way of teaching Intro and/or the alternative. And, of course, there has to be something to be said for a mix, or ways that I'm not even entertaining here.