Andrew Mills

Have you ever adopted the persona of someone like the Socratic gadfly in the midst of class to provoke discussion? Or maybe a high-energy performer to hold student interest? Many educators sense that part of success in teaching is dependent on how they show up to interact with students or the persona they adopt in the classroom. Yet, scholars have not adequately considered the role of pedagogical personas as an element of instructional design, and how personas can help or hinder their students’ ability to meet the course’s learning goals. We argue that personas play a critical role in instructional design: they help faculty deliver course content, run a class activity, and give structure to the professor-student relationship. Further, in the same way we encourage students to have a growth mindset in the classroom, faculty should adopt a growth mindset with regard to their personas. Finally, faculty can benefit from workshopping their personas with colleagues in the same way that they would an assignment, and we give some tips and strategies for how to do so.

In these essays, 24 of our most celebrated professors of philosophy address the problem of how to teach philosophy today: how to make philosophy interesting and relevant; how to bring classic texts to life; how to serve all students; and how to align philosophy with more "practical" pursuits. Selected and introduced by three leaders in the world of philosophical education, the insights contained in this inspiring collection illuminate the challenges and possibilities of teaching the academy’s oldest discipline.

In the classroom, philosophers face not only the perennial problems of philosophy, but the problems of _teaching_ philosophy, and specifically the problems of teaching philosophy today: how to make philosophy interesting and relevant to students who are resistant to, or unfamiliar with, the discipline; how to bring classic texts to life within our current socio-cultural context; how to serve all students regardless of their abilities, backgrounds, or declared majors; how to sustain our discipline in light of support for more "vocational" pursuits. In these essays, 24 of our most celebrated professors of philosophy offer perspectives on and solutions to these questions and more. Selected and introduced by three leaders in the world of philosophical education, the insights contained in this inspiring collection illuminate the challenges and possibilities of teaching the academy’s oldest discipline.

What accounts for the facility that masters of a language have with their language? The view I call the "Linguistic Knowledge Thesis" answers: knowledge. That is, it is because those who have mastered a language know the truths formulated in the semantic theory for that language that they have the facility that they do. Devotees are drawn to the Thesis out of a distaste for behaviorist or dispositional alternatives, but they encounter trouble when pressed to explain the nature of linguistic knowledge. Indeed, a common complaint against the thesis is that it threatens to overintellectualize language use in just the ways Wittgenstein taught us to suspect. Advocates of the Thesis frequently characterize a master's linguistic knowledge as "tacit" or "implicit", but this merely labels the problem. At the other extreme, there are those who explain mastery as the possession of a practical ability. This view has definite advantages: it does not require attributing to language users the contents of speculative and highly technical linguistic theories, and it may even make for a simpler theory of language acquisition. Yet it waits on a suitable account of practical abilities: mastery is not a practical ability in the sense that cycling and swimming are. ;The resolution of this debate consists in realizing that each side is, more or less, right about one half of language use. A non-knowledge-based view is an attractive conception of "hearing" a language; we can account for the comprehension of the sentences one encounters in books or on the radio without invoking linguistic knowledge. Yet we do need to ascribe such knowledge to language users in order to make sense of speaking--producing sentences in normal speech situations. This speaker-based approach to the Linguistic Knowledge Thesis is sharply at odds with those inspired by Davidson, Chomsky, and Fodor, whose views are grounded in facts about sentence comprehension. There are at least two important consequences of this argument: first, it turns out that speakers know, at best, only scattered bits of the highly speculative linguistic theories in question, and second, the knowledge they do have is the ordinary sort of knowledge we ascribe to agents in the course of rationalistic explanations of their behavior

Reflective journals are characterized by their expressive freedom and their intent that students explicitly connect course material to their own life experiences, emotions, beliefs, and feelings. Drawing on research on the use of reflective journals and on the reflections of students in my philosophy courses, I demonstrate how philosophy professors can use reflective journals as a tool to help their students achieve important learning outcomes. By making philosophy personal for students, reflective journals allow students to practice philosophy as a way of life, achieve important metacognitive outcomes, and (drawing on constructivism in learning theory) increase their knowledge and understanding of course content.

A tempting solution to problems of semantic vagueness and to the Liar Paradox is an appeal to truth-value gaps. It is tempting to say, for example, that, where Harry is a borderline case of bald, the sentenceHarry is baldis neither true nor false: it is in the ‘gap’ between these two values, and perhaps deserves a third truth-value. Similarly with the Liar Paradox. Consider the following Liar sentence: is false.That is, sentence says of itself that it is false. If we accept the Tarskian schema S is true iff pwhere ‘S’ is a name of a sentence ‘p,’ we are led into paradox. Both the assumption that is true, and the assumption that is false lead us, via, to is true if and only if is false.Given this result, a natural reaction is to place in a ‘gap’ between true and false.

This paper describes an interdisciplinary course on the philosophy of human nature that centers on the famous 1924 kidnapping-ransom-murder case involving Leopold and Loeb. After recounting the details of the “perfect crime” of Leopold and Loeb, the course is structured around five units: (i) free will/determinism, (ii) the debate between retributivists and therapeutic approaches to punishment, (iii) the morality of the death penalty, (iv) Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and “slave moralities”, and (v) homosexuality. In addition to being truly interdisciplinary, the course promotes the critical evaluation of a variety of non-philosophical (films, novels, plays, courtroom transcripts) works and shows how philosophy can play a role in making sense of the “real world”.

Traditionally, students have no choice over which assignments they must submit to receive the grade they desire in a course. An alternative “menu approach” provides students with a list of possible assignments and lets them select which to submit. This approach is demonstrated to increase student engagement with course material, motivate students to engage in creative work, and allow students to choose assignments that allow them to best demonstrate their learning. Student reaction is mixed: some like the choice but others are stressed and overwhelmed by it. This may result from the increased responsibility they must shoulder under the Menu Approach. Some questions remain about the link between increased engagement and student learning, questions that may form the basis for future research on the Menu Approach.