Taking stock

We’re about half-way through the term and, with reading week next week, I have a bit of room to breathe and take stock of how things are going.

Before this term, I had about three years of teaching experience: one year as a TA at Durham and two years teaching at Roehampton. As a TA, I think I achieved an ok balance between promoting discussion and providing information, but I was probably a little prone to assuming the position of the ‘subject supposed to know’. The insecurities of PhD research left me all too ready to jump in and provide the answer. At Roehampton, for the first year and a half I did PowerPoint based lectures, spiced up with fairly frequent questions to the class. At the end of that period, though, I was frustrated. While there was some class discussion, it tended to be too brief and usually took the form of students trying to figure out the answer to a question I had asked. It was much rarer for the students to question the text themselves (at least out loud).

This approach to teaching is problematic. Following Freire, I’m opposed to the ‘banking’ model of education. As he explains, this model installs the teacher as a person with authority dispensing knowledge to be stored and returned. This method presents two issues. First, we grade students against rubrics that privilege critical analysis. If class is spent explaining a text, with some time devoted to historical critiques (or even my own critical analysis), I’m effectively expecting students to pick up the tools of critical thinking without over providing a space for them to offer their own analysis of the text. Even when I gave reading questions and started sessions off with small group discussions, when we came back as a group it tended to be my own ideas that directed the conversation. Then, come the end of term, I’d mark essays and wonder why the work was so descriptive.

Second, most of my students don’t need to know much about Descartes’ Meditations. They’ll go on to a variety of careers, very few of which will involve critiquing the trademark argument. I certainly think that their lives can be enriched by reading the Meditations and thinking about how Descartes influenced subsequent philosophy, but this requires actively engaging with his ideas. The point is not to learn about Descartes, but to think with Descartes. Put another way, as has become my little motto, we’re not here just to study philosophers, but to think philosophically.

My last semester at Roehampton I switched to using a SMART Board and putting key quotations on PowerPoint slides. This improved things a bit. I still found that the PowerPoint dictated our discussion, though. So when I started at Chichester I decided to work with the following rules: there will be no lectures and no PowerPoint; students will dictate the questions we discuss; and essay questions should make it virtually impossible to write a descriptive piece of work.

In each of our classes, we begin by discussing our reactions to the text. What were the major themes? What are the major components of the argument? What questions does it raise? Are their obvious weaknesses? I make a list of the questions and critiques and we work our way through the text trying to answer them as best we can.

At this point in the term, I feel like it’s working pretty well. I find this approach both more stressful and more rewarding. Students talk a lot more, but it can be tricky if we’ve read a particularly difficult text. In sessions on Aquinas and Spinoza I had to slip into lecturing mode, but was able (I think) to bring it back to a decent conversation. I find that I spend about the same amount of time on teaching prep, but this time is almost entirely reading. That’s great – I like reading. I used to spend hours preparing lectures and PowerPoint presents. It also means that the conversation is more likely to veer into areas beyond my ‘expertise’. No matter how much Ranciere I’ve read, it’s hard to tell students that I just don’t know the answer. Finally, I have to trust the students will show up having done the reading and ready to discuss the text. I could probably wing it for half a class, but it wouldn’t be a very productive session. So far I’ve been impressed with the degree to which students are doing the primary reading, the supplemental reading I provide and even seeking out their own resources.

All in all, this different approach has allowed me to enjoy teaching even more and have lots of interesting discussions around the issues that the students raise. They have an opportunity to think critically in class and push one another to question their assumptions and beliefs. Hopefully I don’t find out that I’ve been deluding myself when they fill out module evaluations…

‘Identity politics’ and the philosophical canon

Yesterday, Brian Leiter offered his thoughts on identity politics and the study of philosophy. Leiter perpetuates a line of thinking I often come across – surely they don’t expect us to include non-whites in the curriculum purely for the sake of diversity. As Leiter says, ‘should we really add East Asian philosophers to the curriculum to satisfy the consumer demands of Asian students rather than because these philosophers are interesting and important in their own right?’

A few things: first, as far as consumer demands go, this doesn’t seem that bad. If there are philosophical traditions which stem from the same cultures as your students, at the very least incorporating those traditions alongside the western tradition seems like a good goal. If a university can invest in new cafes, new study carrels and add more options in the dining hall, adding an elective module on Asian philosophy feels like a reasonable concession.

Second, Leiter’s phrasing of the question implies that the rich philosophical traditions of South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia might not be interesting and important in their own right. He references Nussbaum later in the post and perhaps she would be a good place to start. Her work is part of the established tradition, but she finds it worthwhile to engage with Indian philosophy. The Durham philosopher of Law Thom Brooks does as well. These aren’t examples of people pursuing some radical agenda – they find interesting patterns of thought in Indian philosophy which challenge and push Western thought. The fact that they, and many others, find philosophy from outside Europe and North America ‘interesting and important in their own right’ is a good reason to begin to include it in our teaching.

Third, there’s the problem of teaching what you don’t know:

most Anglophone philosophers have no opinion at all about non-Western philosophy because they are simply ignorant of it.  Some regret the ignorance, others think it is excusable since there are so many philosophical traditions in the world and one can only master so many, and others just don’t think about it at all because it is possible to pursue an academic career in philosophy ignorant of a lot of things, including large swaths of the history of European philosophy…

It’s simply not acceptable for a philosopher to ‘have no opinion at all about non-Western philosophy’. Even the phrasing points to the historical relationship between Europe, North America and the rest of the world – a relationship in which the humanity and agency of any not-white person is denied, oppressed or, at best, begrudgingly and partially acknowledged. To have no opinion on that state of affairs as it bears on your field of research is inexcusable. To return to the previous point, this objection only makes sense if you think there’s a real possibility that traditions of thought developed over thousands of years might not have interesting things to say.

I have more sympathy for the ‘one can only master so many’ forms of philosophy argument. How do you teach a philosopher whose name you struggle to pronounce? But this objection is based on a problematic understanding of teaching. It assumes that teaching consists of a master dispensing knowledge to students who retain and repeat that information for a mark or grade. I’ve been trying to frame undergraduate education in a different way, one which is more collaborative and based on discussion (I do realise I work at a small institution that affords me this luxury). Why not structure a course around trying to create a better course? Allow them to construct an alternative history of philosophy incorporating marginalised perspectives. This provides a forum in which students can explain why they think a new canon is needed. If the lecturer thinks the students are wrong, allow for discussion and debate (sorry I’ve been reading Ranciere lately so now I’m filled with lofty notions about education and liberation). I’m certainly guilty of not teaching material because I feel that I haven’t yet sufficiently mastered it and I don’t want students to ask questions for which I have no answer. We need to ask what kind of message this conveys. ‘I see your point about the exclusion of huge portions of humanity from the history of thinking, but I’m too worried about stepping outside what I know to do anything to address that problem’?

Finally, what I find most frustrating about the post (as indicative of a fairly common attitude) is that it, yet again, reduces everything to a series of problems that matter. The people who count are the ones who speak and write about these problems. We only need to incorporate non-Western philosophers if they have something interesting to say about those problems that matter. The fulfilling thing about picking up African or Chinese philosophy, though, is finding different questions, or similar questions asked in different ways. Not including groups from historically (or contemporarily) marginalised communities, reinscribes that marginalisation. Our syllabi say that they don’t count. This isn’t about identity politics in philosophy. Arguing that it is abstracts the teaching of philosophy from the racial, cultural and gendered contexts in which we teach.

History of Ideas module

With the start of term arriving tomorrow, I’m finishing up my teaching plans. The module that I’ve struggled most to pin down is ‘The History of Ideas: Greeks to the Modern Day’. 

The biggest challenge is the lack of time – we have an 11 week term which includes reading week. So I have 10 sessions to teach the history of ideas. The first week it’s hard to assign reading (especially since it’s my first year – I couldn’t tell students at the end of last year to keep an eye on Moodle for preparatory readings). I’m going to try to work around this dilemma by doing an in class reading. This has two advantages. First, I don’t lose the first week. Second, in reading a text together, we can talk about how to engage with a text.

My instinct is to read a selection of great canonical works, alongside the less canonical, more disruptive critiques that emerge from feminist and post-colonial perspectives. It’s hard to do that, though, in 9 sessions. I was thinking about this this morning when I was reading a blog post by Scu on teaching canons.

I’ve pretty much set the reading schedule and it’ll be as follows: Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant and Foucault (together), Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir. This will allow students to engage with some classic texts that come up a lot in philosophy of religion (Aristotle’s Physics, for example) and familiarise them with basic debates about transcendence, immanence, analogy, subjectivity, empiricism and nihilism. The reading from de Beauvoir, I hope, will recontextualise the work we do over the course of the term, showing how these histories of rational development and progress are built upon a foundation of invisible contributions of others. The week on Kant and Foucault will look at ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and will provide an opportunity for students to read a text followed by a philosophical critique of the same text. Students often go to secondary sources to understand assigned reading, but I want to push them to engage directly with the issues raised by Kant. Finally, I’m encouraging students to supplement their readings with Clack’s Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition.

Still, I have 8 weeks of white men. Even if I push students to think about the history of Western philosophy from a wider context in which we consider race, gender and sexuality, I can’t avoid the fact that by structuring the module this way I’m denying the agency of philosophers and theorists who have worked to combat this lopsided view of history. In future years I could propose making the course last the entire year or breaking it into two separate modules, but that won’t help now.

I tend to think it’s important to teach both the canon and the important work which deconstructs the very notion of the canon. Without both, I run the risk of installing a new master (to use Lacanian terminology) rather than pulling apart the master’s discourse. It’s the techniques of questioning and dismantling a canon that is key, but in order to engage in that work students need to first come to terms with the ways in which the western philosophical tradition has structured many people’s experience of the world.

Of course, this is one module in a degree progamme. We don’t have to do everything in one term. Nonetheless, this remains one of the most difficult issues for me. How do you balance tradition and critique for the purposes of undergraduate education?

 

Job at the University of Chichester

My department is advertising a 0.5 position in Biblical Studies. The details are here. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email at T.Lynch at chi.ac.uk.

Micro-resistances

The other day I was thinking about the term micro-agression. I was mostly thinking about the term because of James KA Smith’s unhelpful article and Anthony Paul Smith’s satisfying smack down. At the same time, I’ve been looking at Gramsci, popular education and the relationship between philosophy and the politics of resistance.

In moments of great tension (IS, Ferguson, Gaza) talking about philosophy and resistance/liberation can feel foolish and cheap. True revolutions happen in the streets, collaborating with other workers, not in the comfortable isolation of university offices banging away on a Macbook. Yet the classroom provides a valuable opportunity to teach patterns of resistance – a basic refusal of accepting things as they come to us. Exposing the contingent nature of systems of meaning and production opens up the space for alternatives.

This understanding of micro-resistance highlights what is so disturbing about Smith’s piece (the core message of which is strikingly similar to the Faith and Theology post about apocalypticism that I discussed earlier). A student who has just discovered Freud, Marx, Focault or Said is developing an alternative view of the world. I remember when I was in high school and read Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It was utterly disorientating. Facilitating those moments of disorientation and helping students decide how to respond is the greatest part of undergraduate humanities.

Problem of Evil Syllabus

Here’s my finalised schedule. I’ll say a bit more about my reasoning at the bottom. The module meets once a week for 2 hours.

Week 1 – Introduction

In class reading, selection from Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Week 2 – Augustine and Plantinga

Augustine, Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope and Love, chapter 4, ‘The Problem of Evil’ 

Augustine, City of God, Book XI, chapters 16-18, 22; Book XII, chapters 2-3

Platinga, The Nature of Necessity, 164-190

Week 3 – Irenaeaus and Hick

John Hick, ‘An Irenaean Theodicy’ in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 39-69.

Week 4 – Hume and Pike

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Parts 10-11

Nelson Pike, ‘Hume on Evil’, The Philosophical Review 72:2 (1963): 180-197

Formative Assessment 1 – Summarise one classical response to the problem of evil. Include references to one contemporary version or critique. This may not be a pair that we have discussed in class.

Week 5 – Surin

Theology and the Problem of Evil, Introduction, pp. 1-37

Week 6 – Surin

Theology and the Problem of Evil, Theodicies with a ‘Practical Emphasis’, 112-142

Week 7 – Reading Week

Formative Assessment 2 – Summarise a theodicy with a practical emphasis. This may not be one mentioned in Surin’s book.

Week 8 – Zygmunt Baumann

‘Sociology after the Holocaust’, Modernity and the Holocaust

Week 9 – Gender and the Problem of Evil 

Robin May Schott, ‘Evil, Terrorism and Gender’, Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil

Week 10 – Race and the Problem of Evil

W.E.B. Dubois, ‘A Litany at Atlanta’

James Cone, ‘God in Black Theology’ in A Black Theology of Liberation, 55-82

Week 11– Concluding discussion

Meillassoux, ‘The Spectral Dilemma’

I had hoped to include a straightforwardly post-colonial analysis of the problem of evil, but wasn’t able to find one. Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion includes an essay that discusses this a bit (‘What is the “Subaltern” of Philosophy of Religion?’), but it only amounts to a 1/3 or so of the essay. I was surprised by my inability to find a straightforward essay/chapter to fill this need in the module. It may be that I’m just not looking in the right places. Searching for theodicy or the problem of evil combined with Fanon, Said, Bhabha, postcolonialism and subaltern all produced occasional references, but not sustained critiques.

I think Cone will help students think through related problems. The problem with teaching black theologies of liberation is that they tend to be very culturally specific to the US. I think many of these issues resonate with concerns here in the UK, but it adds an extra layer of excuses (‘we don’t have those problems here’). Even though that’s not the case, it means that you have to spend doing extra work demonstrating that the UK is not a post-racial society. I’m happy to do that work, but post-colonial analyses tend to hit closer to home (at least for white students).

I’m uncertain of the Schott essay. The book hasn’t arrived, so I’m working off of reviews and snippets of her other writings. Someone like Rosemary Radford Ruether would be an alternative (and would challenge students), but I want to avoid the class being focused entirely on the problem of evil as a problem for theology or philosophy of religion (which is really philosophy of theism). I’ll have time to change the reading if I’m unsatisfied after the book has been delivered.

Each of the weeks will include supplemental resources including other academic works, things taken from the news and the occasional film or television reference. For instance, in the last week I’ll ask students to also read Peter Thompson’s two columns in the Guardian on confronting terminal illness as an atheist. Badiou has a chapter in his Ethics that talks about the problem of evil in a way which resonates with Baumann. I was tempted to just assign the Badiou reading, but I think it would be a little much. Students won’t have been introduced to ‘continental’ philosophy yet and I think they would be thrown by all the talk of the state of the situation and sets.

Each week I’ll provide 3-4 questions to guide their reading. Students will be required to come to class with a question to pose to the rest of the group and our session will begin by working through these issues.

There are already things I would like to change for future years, but I’m not sure if the module will continue in this form. For now, I think it strikes a good balance between what they expect (Plantinga and Hick) and pushing them to think about evil in new and interesting ways. Feel free to correct me though – if I’ve left anything out or am otherwise ruining the education of my students let me know in the comments.

Teaching the problem of evil

I imagine most lecturers have a handful of topics (or modules) that they would really rather not teach. I have two main ones (so far): proofs for the existence of God and the problem of evil. The former because it mostly consists of endlessly rehashing tired arguments. Any developments require greater knowledge of mathematics, formal logic or physics than I or the average undergraduate possess. The trick, of course, is to shift the question from ‘can one prove the existence of God’ to ‘what role do attempts to prove the existence of God play in religious discourse’ or ‘what forms of knowledge are privileged by the attempts to prove the existence of God’. The problem is that these important questions require you spend a bit of time reading through the proofs for the existence of God.

My lack of love for the problem of evil stems from the same kinds of problems. I also don’t enjoy having to spend time talking about the depths of human depravity – I’m not an overly optimistic person to begin with and spending a semester talking about the Holocaust or sexual abuse of children makes me feel even more nihilistic than usual. The problem of evil, though, does drive home the implications of deeply held beliefs about God and the sources of evil.

This year, I’m trying to structure my module on the problem of evil in a way that encourages students to think about how ideas of evil are invoked in discussions of gender, cultural difference, class, race, etc. In short why is it that some groups seem to suffer more than others? And why are certain groups more easily cast as evil?

Since most students will be familiar with the basic contours of the debate, I’m only going to spend the first two weeks on the traditional responses (Augustine and Plantinga, Irenaeaus and Hick). To help make the critical turn, we’re going to look at Kenneth Surin’s Theology and the Problem of Evil. The class will mostly focus on philosophy of religion, but Surin’s book is still one of the best challenges to standard theodicy. The chapter on theodicies with a ‘practical emphasis’ introduces people like Dorothe Söelle, who will be unfamiliar to most students. I’ll follow this with Baumann’s essay on modernity and the Holocaust, which I have found to be very affecting in the past.

I’m still searching for the best texts to help students consider the problem of evil in the wider contexts of gender, race, class, etc. I considered using Nel Noddings’ Women and Evil, but couldn’t fit in into the structure of the module (it would require more than one week and I’m struggling to fit everything in as it is). I have an edited collection of essays on post-colonial philosophy of religion and Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought on the way, which may shake things up a bit. I’d love to have the class read William Jones’ Is God a White Racist? (per Marika Rose’s suggestion), but I think I’d struggle to get a copy in the library before the start of term.

I’ll be finishing the syllabus in the next few days. Once I’ve nailed everything down I’ll post it. In the meanwhile, if anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Robo-Readers

Slate just ran a story about ‘robo-readers’, services that provide automated feedback on students’ writing. Generally, I don’t like the encroachment of technology on the classroom (particularly in the humanities). There are some situations (courses with large numbers of students) where technology might help address problems, but I still hold that there is no replacement for face to face engagement with students. My teaching experience has been at smaller universities where this is possible, so I’ve been able to rely primarily on tutorials for giving students feedback.

The services discussed in the Slate piece seem worthwhile, however, for two reasons. First, students may be more likely to seek out feedback if it is not coming from a lecturer. Particularly if a student feels marginalised at university (for whatever reason), being able to turn to an impersonal service may make them feel more comfortable.

Second, even at a smaller university there is only so much time you can spend with any student. Whether I have half an hour or an hour with a student, I want to focus on the ideas at the centre of an essay. Helping students anticipate objections, examine concepts from other perspectives, seek out new resources – these are the key objectives of my tutorials. Going through grammatical problems not only takes time away from engaging in these important discussions, it can often leave students feeling discouraged. This discouragement than distracts them from our conversation about the main ideas of the essay. So, while effectively expressing your perspective is an important part of studying in the humanities, I usually discuss essay structure in person and leave the finer points of writing for written feedback. If a student’s writing is particularly poor I direct them to academic support or suggest that they spend extra time proofreading. Unfortunately, not all students find their way to academic support and students often don’t thoroughly read the feedback they receive on their work.

All that to say, it seems like these services could have some role to play as part of the undergraduate writing process.

Constructing a degree

I have the fantastic opportunity/overwhelming responsibility of designing a BA in Philosophy and Ethics. There are a couple of parameters: 1) I have to use existing modules (so that I’m not proposing a whole range of new courses and the degree can grow organically within the department); 2) being in a Department of Theology and Religious Studies, there needs to be a substantial focus on the philosophy of religion. Apart from that, I have a good deal of freedom to propose modules.

I have a few goals. First, and most importantly, I want to offer students opportunities to study perspectives that challenge the accepted canon of Western philosophy. I think it’s important to study Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel (of course), etc. It’s also important, however, to help students recognise the contingent nature of this canon. Moreover, if we really think that philosophy is important, that ideas matter, then students need to grasp the way that this contingent canon has been intellectually exclusive and contributed to the social and political marginalisation of a variety of perspectives. Second, I don’t want students to approach the study of philosophy as the study of philosophers – I want them to study philosophical questions with the aid of the history of philosophy. I often think of this in terms of cooking. I love duck confit. When I look up a recipe, I’m not primarily interested in learning about the recipe – I want to eat duck confit. Too much of undergraduate education is thinking about recipes rather than eating.

In the past my teaching has fallen into the familiar pattern of studying a series of figures, occasionally puling back to discuss wider themes. So in a class entitle ‘Theology and Modernity’ we read Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and then considered feminist and post-Holocaust critiques of modernity. All too often class discussion focused on what Descartes said rather than understanding what Descartes said in order to think about the relationship between modern philosophy and theology. In my experience, the especially eager students are excited to be reading Hume or Nietzsche but a significant portion of the class winds up selecting an essay question, getting a handle on the basic concepts of a particular philosopher and then regurgitating this information in their essay. At the end of the term, they might know a bit more about Marx, but they haven’t critically engaged with the material. Trying to correct this lack of engagement requires changing the way the students engage with the material, which means rethinking the way I structure my classes.

If, as Adam Kotsko suggested in an episode of My Name is My Name with APS (an excellent podcast that you should check out), the purpose of higher education is to enable students to live better lives, rather than just memorising information, then that needs to be reflected in the way we teach.