Question As an educator but outsider to philosophy I've heard rumors about students' experiences as philosophy students in college and was wondering if the professors on this site could shed some light: One student told me that while philosophy began properly with Socrates as a relentless quest to improve the soul, philosophy as it is taught today has long abandoned the goal of improving character or deepening the philosophy student's lived experience, and that it has become an exclusively mental activity. I was also told that in disuniting learning from life, philosophy departments were only following the trend of other humanities departments which were also divorcing knowledge from soul as much as possible and keeping all assignments and discussions mental and analytic. Without intending to criticise, if this is indeed true, isn't it strange and antithetical to the essence of philosophy, literature, and many of the humanity subjects, since the goal of so many writers was to touch and expand the contours and sympathies of the souls of their readers? (Naturally one could still do this, I would think, even if the 'soul' as a philosophical concept were in question in some courses). Thanks for your time.

Accepted:
September 9, 2006

Comments

I don't know your students' experiences, of course, so I don't know if they were justified in coming to the conclusions they did on the basis of those experiences. I can tell you, from my experience, both that I strive mightily to teach philosophy as a discipline dedicated to finding the truth about important questions in a systematic and disciplined way. In my introductory undergraduate courses, I teach (and I don't know of anyone in the profession who does not) questions like: Does God exist? Is morality objective? Do we have free will? Is the mind distinct from the body? In my introductory course, "Philosophical Issues in Femnism" we take up a number of topical issues: Does nature determine gender roles? Is affirmative action justified? Should pornography be restricted? Should abortion be legal? Does religion oppress women? It is not my express goal to either improve my student's character -- I think that would be presumptuous in the extreme -- nor to "deepen their lived experience." Of course, I think philosophy is deeply edifying, and I think that clear thinking is helpful in daily life, and I think that new insights beget more new insights -- so I'm hopeful that taking my course will have positive benefits for my students. But I also think it is strictly their business why they take my course, and that it would be pedagogically wrong for me to impose my hopes for their development as goals of the course.

I have observed that students have a variety of expectations when they come to a philosophy course, and that many of them are thwarted. Some of them seem to expect "The Truth" to be revealed; some expect practical advice on how to be better people. These students are going to be disappointed in any standard intro course. Most of us "teach the conflict" (as I think they say in some literature departments): we show students a variety of answers to the questions we're studying, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each as we go along. This often leaves students feeling a bit at sea; it's part of our disciplinary ethos that that's perfectly OK.

Another thing I find is sometimes disappointing to students is their discovery that systematic thinking requires lots of small analytical steps. This means that if you start out talking about whether the mind is distinct from the body, you might have to consider whether any state of affairs that you can conceive of is genuinely possible, or some similarly arcane and abstract question, or whether a statue is identical to or distinct from the lump of clay from which it's made. Students often regard this sort of progression as a kind of bait-and-switch. But the fact of the matter is that it may not be possible to give serious answers to difficult, complicated, and important questions without slogging around in the details. For students with limited patience for this, I like the situation to practicing in music or in sports -- what scales are to Carnegie Hall, so modal logic is to the Meaning of Life. (Except that lots of people actually enjoy modal logic.)