For giving the students a good picture of a branch of philosophy are classic authors' text, specially very hard ones, replaceable by secondary literature or not?

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Please see question 1066 and replies.

My experience is that manybeginning students can learn and grow a lot by engaging intensively with primary texts. This engagement is difficult for students and their instructors, but when it occurs it is extremely intellectually rewarding.

One of my earliest memories of a student was sitting alone in my college's library reading Hobbes. At one point, I "got it" and began to slow down and think hard and gain a lot from thinking about his ideas and arguments. Another was spending most of a semester discussing one single article--Quine's "Two Dogmas"--with an instrutor who was willing to throw the course syllabus out of the window and discuss those ideas as deeply and for as long as his students wanted. These were both extremely powerful experiences to me, and to my they represent a form of of "deep enagement" that still means a lot of me two decades later.

As an eductator, it excites me to help students to learn how to achieve this kind of philosophical engagement, and I think that many students enjoy ultimately enjoy this more than when I aim for less ambitious educational objectives like merely becoming familiar with a topic or a field by reading secondary literature. I've been impressed by how well my students have come to do this in a wide variety of introductory and other "service" courses designed for students who are not majoring in philosophy.

That said, while I don't shy away from teaching very hard texts (they are all pretty hard when you engage them closely!), some texts are too difficult to work well for students who don't have prior experience in philosophy. For example, I love reading and teaching Donald Davidson's work, but most students can't engage his texts well without lots of careful prepartion. So, I would be hard-pressed to teach primary texts like those in service courses, and if I did I would be likely to assign secondary sources.

I'm also willing to abandon the eduational objective of engaging with primary philospohical texts when a particular group of students is not well-served by that goal. For example, when teaching a group of nursing professionals I ended up replacing a standard bioethics anthology with a "textless" course that focused on intensive work with case studies that I designed. For those students in that nursing program, that unorthodox structure worked much better than using standard primary or secondary literature at helping them to engage deeply with key bioethical ideas.

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