TEACHING

I regard teaching, along with research, as equally important components of my work in philosophy. I enjoy teaching large introductory classes as well as more advanced seminars with small numbers of students.

What I find special about teaching philosophy is the potential for high level intellectual interaction even with beginning students, whose questions and insights enrich my experience as a teacher to at least as great an extent as I may be contributing to their philosophical education. I think that this is a rather unique feature of teaching philosophy as opposed to such subjects as science, mathematics, history, or languages. It reflects my attitude toward philosophy as a discipline concerned with the rigorous investigation of concepts in a context of argument and analysis, for which even students completely new to the subject can make substantive contributions, and whose insights are often more valuable and refreshing because of their lack of prior ideological commitment.

Philosophy as I understand it and try to teach it in my classes and seminars is not merely a set of conclusions, and especially not merely a collection of opinions or policy statements for practical conduct, but a method of open-minded inquiry about a specific range of conceptual issues. What is most important in my classes, therefore, is engagement with the problems of philosophy, and the progressive appreciation for what makes a philosophical question interesting and the many ways in which philosophy can try to understand and sometimes solve the problems it discovers.

My recent textbook writing projects are meant to provide useful classroom tools for students at various levels in the study of philosophy. My monograph Philosophy of Mind has been used in introductory philosophy, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and psychology and cognitive science courses. I have recently published a textbook on Symbolic Logic, which is packaged with an Instructor’s Manual, and a Student Solutions Manual, and is available for use as an electronic tutor in the form of interactive computer lessons on CD-Rom, designed in collaboration with Nelson Pole as a version of his already successful Logic Coach III. The book and supplementary materials are published by Wadsworth Publishing Inc., a division of Thompson. The book contains thousands of problems to work, and the methods of logic are introduced by means of Demonstration Problems as the principal pedagogical innovation, which break down thirty typical problems in logic into a series of general steps to be followed in solving similar exercises scattered at strategic points throughout the text and at the end of each chapter. I have presented a detailed argument from the text for treatment in symbolic logic addressed to instructors in the field in "An Elementary Deductive Logic Excercise: Maximus Tyrius's Proof That There is No Injustice", Teaching Philosophy, Logic Notes, 29, 2006, 45-52.

I have also published a short introductory problems approach to philosophy written entirely without scholarly apparatus, footnotes or references to the history of philosophy, titled, Six Philosophical Appetizers, which, as the name suggests, is meant to introduce students to philosophy by involving them in a series of philosophical problems all connected with an effort to deal systematically with the topic of the meaning of life. The book is published by McGraw-Hill with an accompanying anthology, Philosophical Entreés: Classic and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy, which I have edited specifically for use with the Appetizers, but which can also be used independently, just as the Appetizers might be used by itself or in conjunction with another anthology or selection of original philosophical writings.

I have also recently published with Oxford University Press a combined problems and historical introduction to philosophy, titled, Pathways in Philosophy: An Introductory Guide with Readings. The book examines classic texts from an historical and critical philosophical perspective, to help students learn to interpret and analyze philosphical writings. The works considered include Plato’s Meno, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, William Ockham's Summa Logica I, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. The book’s purpose is to discuss a wide range of philosophical questions in historical context, and thereby to provide an overview of the selected episodes in the history of philosophy along with first hand exposure to a variety of philosophical methodologies, each a different pathway in philosophy.

My edited collections of specially commissioned previously unpublished essays for advanced classroom and research application have appeared in the Blackwell Companion to Philosophical Logic, as well as Blackwell’s Philosophy of Logic: An Anthology and Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology, intended for the same audience of students and professionals in the field.

My text on Journalistic Ethics: Moral Responsibility in the Media, Prentice Hall, is intended for classroom use by philosophy, journalism, and media studies and communication arts students, and anyone interested in the ethical dimensions of news gathering and reporting. It is scheduled to be published in December 2006.

I have recently begun series editing a collection of 'New Dialogues in Philosophy' for Rowman & Littlefield. These are dialogues intended for classroom use in the tradition of Plato, George Berkeley, and David Hume, and are meant to dramatize philosophical ideas for lively classroom discussion and debate. The dialogues will appear in three categories of subject matter, value theory (theoretical and applied ethics and aesthetics), theory of knowledge (including philosophy of science), and logic and metaphysics (including philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind).

It is part of my long range plans for some of these textbooks, especially those connected with the study of symbolic and informal logic that they also be made available in whole or in part as supplementary materials for use on the WorldWideWeb for internet instruction in the World Classroom. I have written and continue to refine these philosophical textbooks from the standpoint of my own ongoing classroom experience, with the input and sometimes the direct assistance of my students, and with the benefit of reactions from classroom tested applications of my pedagogical writings on the part of other colleagues in the field at other institutions.