Stephen Bloch-Schulman

_Thinking Through Questions_ is an accessible and compact guide to the art of questioning, covering both the use and abuse of questions. Animated by wide-ranging and engaging exercises and examples, the book helps students deepen their understanding of how questions work and what questions do, and builds the skills needed to ask better questions. Cowritten by two of today's leading philosopher-teachers, _Thinking Through Questions_ is specifically designed to complement, connect, and motivate today’s standard curricula, especially for classes in critical thinking, philosophical questioning, and creative problem- solving (called here "expansive questioning"). Offering students a wide and appreciative look at questions and questioning, this small book will also appeal to faculty and students across the disciplines: in college writing courses, creativity workshops, education schools, introductions to college thinking, design thinking projects, and humanities and thinking classes. Open-ended, creative, and critically self-possessed thinking is its constant theme—what field doesn’t need more of that?

In philosophy, much attention has rightly been paid to the need to diversify teaching with regard to who teaches, who is taught, and which authors and questions are the focus of study. Less attention, however, has been paid to inclusive pedagogy—the teaching methods that are used, and how they can make or fail to make classes as accessible as possible to the diverse students who enter them. By drawing on experiences from our own teaching as well as research on student-centered, inclusive best practices, we advocate for five principles of inclusive pedagogy: fostering a growth mindset, examining inclusive conceptions of authority, promoting transparency, encouraging flexibility, and, finally, continually promoting self-reflection for both students and teachers.

In philosophy, much attention has rightly been paid to the need to diversify teaching with regard to who teaches, who is taught, and which authors and questions are the focus of study. Less attention, however, has been paid to inclusive pedagogy—the teaching methods that are used, and how they can make or fail to make classes as accessible as possible to the diverse students who enter them. By drawing on experiences from our own teaching as well as research on student-centered, inclusive best practices, we advocate for five principles of inclusive pedagogy: fostering a growth mindset, examining inclusive conceptions of authority, promoting transparency, encouraging flexibility, and, finally, continually promoting self-reflection for both students and teachers.

In this dissertation, my goal is to explore and to offer an internal critique of Hannah Arendt's work on responsibility. I will argue that it is necessary to take into account two experiences which set the stage for all of her thinking on this subject: first, her experience of totalitarianism and, second, her finding that the Western philosophic tradition---far from counteracting totalitarianism---actually helped create the conditions that made it possible. She takes from these experiences the two primary concerns, plurality and novelty, for all of her work and these concerns determine the way she organizes her thinking on responsibility. ;After examining the lessons Arendt learned from totalitarianism in Chapters One and Two, I will turn to Arendt's account of political, personal and ethical responsibility to reveal how her description of each type of responsibility is driven by her understanding of plurality and novelty. Chapter Three will focus on Arendt's notion of public responsibility which is her attempt to account for how humans can counteract totalitarianism and totalitarian solutions to the problems of modernity through public, cooperative action. Arendt, however, acknowledges that there are times when humanness is being attacked and a person finds herself entirely abandoned by others, i.e., when she is and can be part of no public. In Chapter Four, I will show that, when public action is not possible, Arendt holds that one must find a way to remain personally responsible even in a crisis and she claims that this requires that the individual think and judge for herself. Finally, in Chapter Five, I will look at Arendt's notion of ethical responsibility, in which she recognizes that there are times when a person finds herself within a community of others and finds herself both responsible and needing to act alone

This paper defines natural hierarchies of function and relation classes □i,kc and Δi,kc, constructed from parallel complexity classes in a manner analogous to the polynomial-time hierarchy. It is easily shown that □i−1,kp □c,kc □i,kp and similarly for the Δ classes. The class □i,3c coincides with the single-valued functions in Buss et al.'s class , and analogously for other growth rates. Furthermore, the class □i,kc comprises exactly the functions Σi,kb-definable in Ski−1, and if Tki−1 is Σi,kb-conservative over Ski−1, then □i,kp is completely parallelizable. All functions in □i,kc are Σi,kb-definable in Rki; this suffices to show that if the known Σi,kb conservativity between R3i and S3i−1 extends to R2i and S2i−1, then NC = NC1 relative to an oracle in PH. We prove a KPT-style witnessing theorem for Ski using constantly many rounds of □i,kc interactive computation, and thus show that if Ski ≡ Rki+1 then the bounded arithmetic hierarchy collapses, provably in Ski

In 2008, Peter Felten, the founding director of Elon's Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, asked me to coordinate an inaugural two-year teaching and learning seminar for faculty, to focus on some element of engaged learning (Elon University's pedagogical focus). We titled the project the Elon Research Seminar on Engaged Undergraduate Learning. As a philosopher who works at the intersections of political philosophy and the scholarship of teaching and learning and as one interested in the relationships among democracy, responsibility, and progressive social justice activism, I decided to ask Elizabeth Minnich, senior scholar for the Association of American Colleges and Universities Office of ..

In this paper, we offer a method of teaching argumentation that consists of students working through a series of cumulative, progressive steps at their own individual pace—a method inspired by martial arts pedagogy. We ground the pedagogy in two key concepts from the scholarship of teaching and learning: “deliberate practice” and “deep approaches to learning.” The step-by-step method, as well as the challenges it presents, is explained in detail. We also suggest ways that this method might be adapted for other classes.

This article is a critical response to Concepción, Messineo, Wieten, and Homan’s “The State of Teacher Training in Philosophy.” In it, I utilize an epistemologies-of-ignorance framework to highlight the incentives we, as philosophers, have to ignore teaching and learning about teaching and learning. I argue that the problems are not merely about our individual desires, but rather, that there is a regime of ignorance that encourages us not to know. I argue therefore that real change requires more than a shift in personal commitments; it requires a change to the system, including how and what we make public and how we evaluate and are evaluated by our peers.