Question If you were to build an introductory philosophy course for community college kids, would you choose to focus more on the philosophers and their theories or would you focus more on philosophical questions (what is being, is there a god, is there a soul). Which do you think would be more effective for struggling or non-traditional learners?

Accepted:
April 4, 2008

Comments

To understand "the philosophers and their theories" you have to understand what philosophical questions were bugging them -- and understand the arguments they give for their theories (since the theories are worth no more than the arguments that support them).

So it's not a really an issue of where to start, philosophers vs. questions. It's more an issue of whose list of questions to start with. An agenda set by some of the great dead philosophers? Or an agenda set by a class of students? Or perhaps somewhere in between -- an agenda set by the author of a good introductory book (like Simon Blackburn's Think) which raises questions that look likely to have immediate "relevance" to the students, but which relates some of the responses and arguments to those of the great dead philosophers?

In general I'd go for the third option. I certainly wouldn't go for the first.

In my experience, a good way to start an introductory course in philosophy is by topics - beginning with ethics, politics, or social philosophy. Most students will not be jazzed about epistemology, for example, from the get-go because the questions asked in that discipline will be unfamiliar. But most everyone will have some background knowledge and life-experience of ethics, say.

If it is a class of returning/older students, you can use this life-experience to your benefit in the classroom by asking students to write about an ethical dilemma they personally had to resolve. As the course unfolds, have the students rewrite the papers to incorporate 'What Plato would have said' or 'What Martin Luther King would have done,' and so on.

Having gained some confidence that they, too, can be philosophers students will be ready to move on to related topics. (To keep with the above examples, how we should treat others is integrally related to what we know.)

I also would advocate for using the original texts whenever possible. I like the reader Voices of Wisdom by Gary Kessler because it is so inclusive – the readings are classic and recent, East and West, Anglo and Continental. The readings are arranged by topic with good editorial prefaces.