Aristotle

The first class on Aristotle's ethics didn't go well. He's a harder read than Plato and I wasn't at my best. So for Thursday I just started over. I went back to the first sentence of NE. It worked very well second time through. I could tell the students were starting to get a sense of who Aristotle was. Second time through gave me the opportunity to offer fresh examples.

Aristotle's point that happiness is an activity is hard for the modern mind to grasp. We are so strongly inclined to think that happiness is a state of mind that we have trouble hearing this. I eased into this by talking about happiness as a product. Suppose someone thought that winning the Superbowl was happiness. Would looking at that Superbowl ring next week, next month, next year, ... really be the same? Then I talked about how good it feels to do something really well. This could be playing music for those with that kind of talent, or skiing if you are good at that. Excellent activity feels good but Aristotle doesn't identify happiness with the feeling. He thinks that the feeling is merely a by-product of the activity. So what we want is an excellent activity that we can sustain for a very long time.

At this point I felt my students really got what Aristotle was saying.

Socrates and Martin Luther King

Today we did the Crito, Plato's discussion of the just man's duty to respect the law. In the Apology Socrates makes a point of telling the jurors that he would never obey a law that ordered him to stop questioning and speaking his mind. Then when Crito asks him to accept help escaping from prison, he says that his respect for the law prevents this. How do you square the Socrates who must "obey the god rather than you" when it comes to unjust law with the law and order Socrates of the Crito? Since this lecture occurs on the heels of MLK Day this is a nice hook. Respect for the law in the Crito means "persuade or obey." The just man does not have an obligation simply to obey the law. His obligation is to respect the law. This means obey or "persuade". By engaging in what we have come to know as civil disobedience Socrates continues to persuade the Athenians. This kind of persuasion is different from the mere lawbreaking of the criminal. The civil disobedient 1) does this publicly and not in hiding, 2) nonviolently, and 3) willingly accepts the penalty for breaking the law.

This class has gone better than any class of mine in recent memory. Something I am doing differently is working.

Relativism

I taught the Apology today and discussed whether Socrates corrupted the youth. Socrates was connected in people's minds with the Sophists and many Athenians thought that the Sophists corrupted the youth. Why did they think so? One reason was that many of the Sophists taught some form of relativism. I explained that relativism itself is a very conservative philosophy. It says that right is whatever your society says is right. Making society's rules correct by definition is about as conservative as you can get. Nevertheless, relativism leads by a very natural train of thought to moral skepticism. If my society says that this is wrong and another society, with equal justification, says that it is right, then why should I take right and wrong seriously. I then took a quick pass through Macchiavelli and Neitzsche for some later examples of moral skepticism. Then I went bake to Socrates. There's no reason to actually think that
Socrates was a relativist.

Socrates is a critic of the moral standards of his society. He does not accept them as they stand. Does that make him a moral skeptic who rejects all moral standards or seeks to invert them as Nietzsche does? No, it is better to describe Socrates as one who thinks the moral standards of his society are too low. Socrates is a moral reformer; not a moral skeptic or nihilist.

So far things are going well. The students seem to get that what these old dead guys were talking about matters to us now.

new ideas for intro to philosophy

I am teaching intro to philosophy this semester and will be trying out some new-to-me ideas. If anyone seems interested I will post short reports on how the experiment is working.

I like to use classic texts. In the past I have lectured on each philosopher one by one. What I found I didn't like about this approach is that it fails to convey to the student that these texts are part of a dialogue that continues throughout history. So now I will be mixing it up more.

In the opening lecture I asked them what justice was and got a few attempted answers which I poked holes in. Then I presented them with William James' little example of the man chasing the squirrel around a tree. The squirrel always moves so that the tree trunk remains between him and the man. James says that the question: does the man go around the squirrel has a clear yes or no answer so long as you have a clear definition of "go around." I explained that much of what philosophers do is try to get clear definitions not of trivial stuff like "go around" but of important things like "justice." Then in the second lecture we began the Euthyphro and I showed them that Euthyphro was unclear about "piety" and that his problems were similar to some of the problems that arose in our discussion of "justice."

I explained the difficulty that people have with defining concepts this way. We learn most concepts my ostention. So we develop a bunch of examples in our heads. Most ordinary concepts seem to be nothing more than a montage of pictures in our heads. No wonder then that Euthyphro, when asked to define piety, just points to a couple of examples.

Students seemed to relate to the idea that ordinary concepts are a montage of pictures. Freedom is a flag waving, jets streaking overhead, a little kid saluting at a parade, etc. It is a good thing, I told them, that Thomas Jefferson had a clearer concept of freedom in his head when he sat down to write the Constitution. His clearer concept enabled him to thoughtfully design a form of government that would promote freedom.

So far the class seems to be going well.