As philosophers, we all do this thing called philosophy. Despite sharing in this activity, it is not immediately clear exactly what we are doing when we do philosophy. One reason for this lack of clarity is that the very boundaries of the discipline itself (delineated by subject matter, methodology, aims, or otherwise) are themselves up for grabs and subject to scrutiny. While such debates typically play out in scholarly journals, collected volumes, and monographs written for other philosophers, there is another, much more common and accessible venue in which these ideas are debated: the philosophy classroom. It’s easy to miss the ways in which these “meta-philosophical” debates about the nature and value of philosophy naturally crop up in pedagogical contexts. After all, most philosophical scholarship does not directly engage in metaphilosophical disputes. Still, when we do philosophical research, we at least assume some sort of metaphilosophical framework. For instance, we assume features of our work make it philosophy rather than, say, biology. The same is true, whether we realize it or not, of our teaching practices; something—other than the title of the course—makes a class philosophy rather than any other discipline.
While most academic philosophers are primarily trained to undertake scholarly research, teaching constitutes the majority of academic philosophers’ day-to-day activities. Still, the general sentiment within the discipline is that “better” jobs are those that afford more time and resources for scholarship and demand less time spent teaching. As Steven Cahn noted in his recent book, Professors as Teachers, “[i]n no way does teaching promote one’s academic career. For that reason, many view time spent in the classroom not as a positive feature of the profession but as a drawback”. In some ways this prevailing attitude makes sense; there is only so much time in the day and time spent thinking about pedagogy, grading, or chatting with students about their education is time not spent advancing one’s own career. In short, one might think that teaching and research are mutually exclusive and one should minimize the time spent on teaching and maximize time spent on scholarship.
This widespread view concerning the relationship between teaching and scholarship, I will argue, is, at least within academic philosophy, both false and pernicious. Our views about the nature of philosophy underlie and shape our teaching practices at virtually every turn. Philosophy teachers must, therefore, be more reflective about what those views are, how they influence what and how we teach, and importantly, what they communicate about the nature of philosophy to our students. More specifically, in what follows, I argue that we should think of teaching philosophy as a form of “doing” philosophy that isn’t all that different from scholarly pursuits. I then consider a few different ways of framing philosophy in teaching and identify the assumptions about philosophy those framings are likely to communicate to students. While I cannot claim to exhaustively survey the myriad ways to teach philosophy, I’ll identify just a couple and gesture toward my preferred approach – understanding philosophy as the practice of “virtuous dialogue.”
The “Default Setting”: Philosophy as Scholarship
Almost everyone familiar with academia knows the three “pillars” of a faculty position: scholarship, teaching, and service. Depending on the sort of institution academics finds themselves in, the evaluative weight of each pillar may vary, but the pillars themselves remain constant and serve both as evaluative criteria for faculty effectiveness and for demarcating the parameters of the job itself. A decreased teaching load is typically accompanied by an increase in scholarly expectations, substantial service requirements (serving as department chair, taking a leadership role in the faculty senate, and so on), or both. By enumerating duties in terms of a trade-off between pillars, professors internalize the idea that these are competing demands in a zero-sum game. Additionally, when it comes time for annual faculty evaluations, we have to define our activities according to established criteria that stipulate where the activity “counts”. Scholarship happens at conferences and in journals where we “advance the scholarly conversation” by sharing our research; teaching happens in the classroom or in office hours where we introduce students to a small subset of the ongoing scholarly discussions; and service is what we do with the rest of our time to ensure that our programs and institutions function.
These features of academic life reinforce the fundamental difference between scholarship and teaching. The “real work” of the philosopher happens only at a very high level of abstraction and among a vanishingly small group of peers equipped with the conceptual machinery necessary to understand and engage with the scholarly discussion. Understood this way, teaching philosophy is a very different activity; we’re not doing philosophy in the classroom! Students typically lack the background knowledge, conceptual framework, or training necessary to participate in the scholarly discussion. When philosophers teach, they’re introducing students to the content necessary to begin to make sense of the discipline. As students progress through a degree and into advanced study, they might get to the point where they can contribute to the dialogue, but that is unlikely until very late in graduate school. By the time students complete their Ph.D. they’re finally in a position to enter the field; it takes that long to get caught up.
The view described above is what I call the “Default Setting” for academic philosophers. Such an understanding of philosophy assumes that philosophy is a discrete set of knowledge claims, skills, or both, with which one must gain facility before being invited to join the discussion. That discussion, of course, is narrowly construed as taking place among academic philosophers and is primarily for academic philosophers. It’s not difficult to see why such a conception of philosophy might not be the most effective pedagogically. When philosophy is taken to be a discipline about highly abstract, esoteric content reserved for specialists, it is difficult for students to see any reason to value it. Philosophy is not unique in facing this challenge, of course. Many students often wonder why they have to study mathematics (or any other disciplines that tend toward the abstract). “When am I ever going to use this?” is a common refrain instructors hear when they are tasked with teaching challenging and abstract subjects. Still, despite these similarities, mathematics programs are unlikely to find their place within the university challenged. Philosophy, of late, has not been so fortunate. Given the general skepticism (whether expressed by students, parents, administrators, legislators, or the public) about the value of philosophy, no amount of enthusiasm for the content or insistence that philosophy matters, absent some way of genuinely inviting students to the table, is likely to convince students to devote years and countless sums of money to studying a discipline with a well-documented reputation for having high barriers to entry, little diversity, and a negative public image. The default setting indicates that philosophy is not for most students. I’ll say more about this below.
Philosophy is a difficult, highly abstract discipline. To do scholarly work at the professional level takes a tremendous amount of training. To teach philosophy well is also a difficult task. The skills associated with the production of excellent scholarship are not obviously transferrable to excellent teaching and vice versa. Since the discipline trains philosophers to be scholars first and teachers second (if at all), there are strong professional incentives to ignore teaching. It shows, too. Anyone who has spent enough time around philosophy departments has no doubt come across at least one professor who is by all accounts a well-regarded, careful scholar but who, for whatever reason, has a tremendously difficult time explaining their work or ideas to anyone outside of their own subdiscipline, let alone outside of philosophy. Some very good scholars are bad teachers. I mention this to illustrate an important point: the connection between being able to do philosophy well and to teach philosophy well depends on what we take philosophy to be. If philosophy is nothing more than a series of peer-reviewed books and articles published by college and university-sponsored academics, as the default setting might suggest, then students don’t do philosophy at all; at best they can learn about philosophy. Philosophy teachers can, and I think should, do better for their students.
Teaching Philosophy (Well) is Doing Philosophy with Students
What does doing better look like? Well, that depends. I believe that the adage, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” is, at least when applied to philosophy, clearly false. I reject the narrow understanding of philosophy suggested by the “default setting.” Before turning to alternate metaphilosophical pedagogies and what they communicate, however, it’s worth taking a moment to show why we might think that teaching is a form of doing philosophy not all that far removed from scholarly research. For if philosophy is an activity that teachers can invite our students to do with us, that is already a significant departure from the default setting and sets the stage for better teaching.
In order to publish, academics typically have to engage their colleagues who are already part of the on-going “scholarly conversation”. The phrase “scholarly conversation” is both an apt description and a well-worn turn of phrase (in the Discourse on the Method (1637), Rene Descartes describes reading good books as having a conversation with distinguished figures from the past). It is also instructive in thinking about the connections between scholarly research and teaching for two reasons: thinking of scholarship as a conversation reminds us that knowledge creation is a social endeavor grounded in an epistemic community, and teaching serves as an introduction to and induction into an epistemic community.
While philosophers typically publish single-author papers and monographs, none of the ideas is solely the creation of the authors. Scholars are part of a broader epistemic community of inquiry (a group sharing background beliefs, methods, standards, goals, etc.). Those who are taken to be members of the epistemic community are signaled in scholarly work through citations and acknowledgements. At the highest levels, the number of people who are plausibly understood to be members of a scholarly community depends on the particular project, aims, role, and context. In our role as researcher, our circle of peers tends to be particularly small. For example, the number of scholars, beside myself, actively researching late-medieval mystical influences on Descartes’ use of genre numbers, at best, in the teens (and even that might be a little optimistic). When I think, however, of my audience for this essay (people who are interested in, but perhaps do not formally work in academic philosophy), the number of people whom I consider part of that epistemic community grows exponentially. This exponential growth in audience illustrates a simple but important point. Whether we communicate our ideas clearly depends on with whom we are conversing. There are ways of conversing with my Descartes-scholar-colleagues that are perfectly clear to them, but would likely be impenetrable to colleagues in my own department. In speaking to my non-historian philosophy colleagues about philosophy, I have to adjust the presentation of my ideas to reflect the shift in background beliefs. This shift, however, does not mean that departmental colleagues are not part of my epistemic community – they are. Rather, it means that clarity is indexed to one’s audience.
Put simply, philosophers are unable to spread the knowledge they create if they are unable to communicate it. While I do not believe that academics are under any obligation to make all of their work immediately accessible to the broadest possible audience, I do believe that skilled philosophers ought to be able to communicate their knowledge beyond the realm of specialists who constitute their most narrowly prescribed epistemic community. But if the clarity of such communication demands thoughtful consideration of the epistemic background of one’s audience, then the difference between communicating one’s specialized knowledge to specialists and to non-specialists is a difference of degree rather than kind. That is, we have to make certain adjustments to our presentation depending on the audience. The move from communicating with my Descartes-scholar colleagues to my non-Descartes-scholar colleague down the hall does not require reconceptualizing my communicative project. Nor is the move from communicating with my philosophy colleague to communicating with a philosophy graduate student so drastic as to demand such a reconceptualization, and so on all the way down to the intro student. Of course, context and audience demand that I make certain concessions or explain certain background assumptions that I might not make in contexts where those concessions are unnecessary or the assumptions are shared, but it seems that no such move is sufficient to justify the idea that when I engage my colleagues I am doing something fundamentally different from engaging my students in a philosophical discussion.
The default setting places too much emphasis on the differences between what happens at the professional/scholarly level and what goes on in the classroom. If I am correct that such differences are merely a matter of degree, then truly effective philosophy teachers will not merely instruct their students about the various doctrines, positions, thinkers, and issues that philosophers discuss, but will invite the students to engage with those ideas through a philosophical dialogue. On such a view, philosophy is a skillful activity shared with epistemic peers rather than a set of doctrines to be learned. I make no claim to novelty in suggesting that philosophy is more than the default setting might suggest – in Plato’s Phaedrus (274c-277a), Socrates expresses his preference for interpersonal dialogue over the written word, noting that writing is inert and “unable to defend or assist itself”. Similarly, the later Greek stoic Epictetus criticized those he called “pseudo-philosophers,” folks who were content to merely read theoretical treatises about philosophical issues. His principal criticism was that such people merely learned about philosophy rather than practicing it in their lives. For what it’s worth, he did see the value in learning from scholarship, but such knowledge was not taken to be an end in itself, a position that stands in stark contrast with the default setting.
Metaphilosophical Frameworks and What They Communicate
Scholarly conversations can and do happen across epistemic communities, and the clarity of the ideas communicated are indexed to the members of that community. It follows that when philosophy teachers introduce students to philosophy through their classes they are inviting students to join a particular epistemic community by providing them with the relevant background beliefs, methods, aims, and so on that constitute the broad epistemic community of philosophers. At the outset of this essay I suggested that regardless of intent, philosophers constantly exhibit their metaphilosophical commitments. While we may not articulate any of the commitments explicitly, the members of our epistemic community with whom we engage, by and large, accept most of those commitments and, ideally, recognize them as philosophy. I’ve just given some reasons to think that research and teaching in philosophy are not different kinds of activities. Rather, they are the same kind of activity occurring with different audiences. Despite the fact that teaching and research have substantial commonalities, there is a sense in which the importance of reflecting carefully on, and clearly articulating our metaphilosophical commitments, increases as we engage with a broader audience.
Practically speaking, the shift from discussing scholarly work with colleagues within one’s sub-specialization to speaking with departmental colleagues, for example, does not necessarily require spelling out precisely one’s philosophical methodology or underlying assumptions (though many conversations with other philosophers go more smoothly when some of those assumptions and beliefs are explicitly spelled out). As our interlocutors’ experience with philosophy generally diminishes, good communicators naturally explain more background assumptions, spell out concepts a little more carefully, and so on. While we might make such adjustments unreflectively, framing that shift in presentation in terms of articulating our metaphilosophical commitments and introducing our interlocutors to the norms of philosophy as we see them can be helpful in thinking about successful communication. I suggest that teachers have a special obligation in virtue of the pedagogical context, not just to articulate metaphilosophical commitments explicitly, but to be thoughtful about how we present the field to our students.
To produce an exhaustive taxonomy of metaphilosophical frameworks for teaching would perhaps be an impossible task, so I won’t try. Instead, I’ll introduce what I believe are two of the more common approaches to teaching philosophy followed by my preferred framing: the “default setting,” the “puzzles approach” and “virtuous dialogue” respectively. After sketching roughly what each approach is, I’ll tease out the messages they are likely to communicate to students about what philosophy is, philosophy’s value, and who philosophy is for. I suspect that, in virtue of the structure of academia, many of the points I make about these frameworks could, with a few adjustments, just as well apply to academic disciplines beyond philosophy. What makes philosophy uniquely worthy of consideration, however, is that students typically have little to no exposure to philosophy prior college (particularly in the U.S.). So while history, for example, may face similar structural challenges, students entering college at least have some idea of what history is and why it matters.
The Default Setting
I’ve already said a bit about the default setting and what it communicates, but it’s worth taking a moment to zoom in and identify some of the features of classes that might emerge from the default setting. As a reminder, the default setting is one that likely stems from the structure of academic job appointments paired with graduate training. In both cases, the emphasis is typically on producing peer-reviewed scholarship. There are, of course, positions where the expectation is that one focus on and excel at teaching, but the default position within the field is that the “real work” is taken to be the production of scholarly articles and books. Again, this framing suggests that philosophy is reserved exclusively for professionals at the top of their field. Since being a good teacher takes time and energy, any time spent on teaching is time not spent doing philosophy, or so the story goes.
This often results in a sort of “sampler platter” approach to teaching philosophy. On such an approach, any given course might be a survey of topics with little to tie them together other than that they’re questions in philosophy or in a specific sub-field. As researchers we may already see how everything hangs together, but students almost certainly don’t. Recognizing what Gettier cases have to do with anything related to political philosophy takes some doing even for seasoned philosophers. Students unfamiliar with philosophy will likely not leave such a course with a clear picture of what the discipline is at all. As such, the default setting can convey a message to students that philosophy is an odd mix of abstract puzzling that is broad in scope and disconnected from other areas, which has little or no “real world” value. The interest of a specific problem or a professor’s enthusiasm and charisma might be enough to pique some students’ interest, but if the sampler-platter is paired with the idea that philosophy can only be done at the highest levels, it’s likely that the vast majority of students will walk away thinking that philosophy is not for them.
I suspect that few, if any, philosophers would be happy sending such messages to their students. I do not mean to suggest that any such messaging is intentional. Still, the first step to correcting the message is to be more intentional about how we frame philosophy in our teaching practices.
The Puzzles Approach
That is not to say that philosophers have been blind to the challenges philosophy as a discipline faces. Philosophers are well aware that recruiting and retaining majors is essential to the continued life of philosophy programs (to the extent that departments have a major). To that end, one trend within the field is to present philosophy as a discipline that is specifically all about puzzles, about transferrable skills, or as a great way to prepare for medical, law, or graduate school. Such a framing has a number of benefits: it can be fun and playful, it clearly illustrates the value of the discipline in terms of future plans and “return on investment” (a phrase that makes me cringe), and it is easily articulable to a broad swath of interested parties: from students to parents, or from administrators to legislators.
Despite its initial plausibility, I maintain that this framing sends some troubling messages. First, this approach seems to ground the value of philosophy in narrow instrumental ends. If one is not planning to “go on,” it’s not clear that thinking about puzzles is worthwhile. Second, it’s entirely unclear that philosophy can corner the market on the skills we teach. Even if philosophy is particularly good at cultivating such skills, philosophers face an uphill battle in demonstrating that it does so better than any other discipline. Absent a compelling reason to think that philosophy does a better job of teaching transferrable skills through the use of deeply abstract puzzles, students are unlikely to see why they shouldn’t study something that is more “practical” which also promises to deliver the same skills. If economics claims to teach “critical thinking” while also teaching students through puzzles that mirror the “real world,” it seems we’re fighting a losing battle on the value front.
But let’s say that it is philosophy that best trains students to think in ways that pay off as preparation for graduate, law, or medical school. If more school is main payoff from studying philosophy, then it is no surprise that the vast majority of philosophers tend to be socioeconomically well-off. For many students, the idea of putting off making money until their late 20s or early 30s (while spending more money on medical or law school) is simply unimaginable. When instructors lean on the idea that philosophy is a gateway for more schooling, we communicate that philosophy is for high-achieving, driven students who have the means to set aside years of earnings and possibly spend even more to further their education. Put another way, on this framing, philosophy seems to be for the “gifted” students who have the opportunity and means to continue on to more schooling after their degree, and who have the time to dedicate to puzzles that have no obvious real-world connections.
Virtuous Dialogue
Perhaps a more subtle problem facing the Puzzles Approach is that teaching students transferrable skills does not mean that students know how or when to appropriately deploy the skills. If, however, instructors present philosophy as a discipline concerned not merely with the development of skill or the knowledge of a set of abstract propositions, but as aimed at helping students become better versions of themselves through the cultivation of virtue (understood as excellent character traits that involve discernment, motivation, and skill), then it seems we address the primary concerns with the above frameworks while maintaining the insights gained from considering them. Whether philosophy, if framed in terms of virtuous dialogue, would best help students become better versions of themselves is an empirical question. There is at least prima facie reason to think that giving students the conceptual resources necessary to conceive of their philosophical education as having such an aim supports positive character development. To fully address that literature would take us too far afield, however. Instead, I will offer a preliminary theoretical argument in favor of a virtue dialogue framing.
Presenting philosophy as the practice of “virtuous dialogue” has a number of benefits. The Default Setting identifies philosophy as comprising the scholarly discussions occurring in various philosophical circles. I argued that such epistemic communities are not exhaustive of the practice of philosophy—that when instructors engage their students in classes they are inducting the students into the epistemic community and inviting them into the dialogue. The conditions of introduction include the awareness of at least some content knowledge (we cannot enter well into a dialogue if we’re unaware of what has been said), good faith interaction, charitable interpretation, adherence to the appropriately agreed upon standards of evidence, and so on. In framing philosophy this way, instructors welcome students to participate actively and collaboratively in the pursuit of truth. By introducing and focusing on the character-based aspects of what it means to be a good interlocutor, instructors are in a position to cultivate not only the sorts of skills that the Puzzles Approach emphasizes, but curate those skills through interpersonal engagement grounded in the idea that we are able to become better interlocutors.
Like the Puzzles Approach, this “Virtuous Dialogue” framing communicates what philosophy is, but does so in a way that is more directly welcoming to all students, or at least any who are actively interested in bettering themselves. The value of the discipline is directly correlated with the study and is pretty far reaching. There’s personal value for the student, professional value through the cultivation of intellectual virtue, and social value to be gained through having more thoughtful, discerning, and civically minded citizens and neighbors. By presenting philosophy as a discipline aimed at cultivating excellent people through dialogue, instructors frame philosophy as a discipline that will likely appeal to anyone and everyone equally. Instructors can capitalize on the “skill” dimension of the puzzles approach, but ground it in several decidedly “real-world” ways while avoiding the concerns about the loss of “practicality” or privileging the already socioeconomically advantaged. Framing philosophy this way in teaching contexts demonstrates the value of the discipline, welcomes everyone into the discipline, and clarifies what the field is, namely, a collaborative endeavor to better understand the world and how we fit in it.
Conclusion
I’ve made a case for several claims that I take to be important with regard to how we teach philosophy. The first is that there is no in-principle difference between doing philosophy with one’s colleagues or peers and teaching philosophy, at least if we’re teaching philosophy well. The second is that just as philosophers communicate their metaphilosophical commitments through the scholarly work they produce, teaching philosophy communicates metaphilosophical commitments as well. Since virtually all teaching involves introducing students to philosophy, philosophy teachers have an obligation to carefully consider what messages they communicate to students about the discipline. I concluded by arguing that framing philosophy as “Virtuous Dialogue” is preferable to the “Default Setting” and the “Puzzles Approach.” I do not mean to claim that “Virtuous Dialogue” is the only framework philosophers can successfully employ, nor do I mean to suggest that every variation of the other frameworks will automatically turn students away from philosophy. Instead, I wanted to start a dialogue about how to teach metaphilosophically.
Kristopher G. Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy Graduate Program Coordinator at Eastern Michigan University and editor-in-chief of the journal Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice. His interests include early modern European philosophy, philosophy for and with the public, and the philosophy of education. He is currently working on his first book which explores seventeenth and eighteenth century conceptions of philosophy and its role in both education and public life.
