Summing Up

The course is over. It's been an exhausting five and a half weeks. I won't post any more on this since there seems to be no interest in discussing how to teach basic intro. This disappoints me since I think it is in some ways the most important course any of us teach.

I think that my efforts to tie the core areas of epistemology and metaphysics to ethics was a success. My students, at least the better ones, saw the connection and it made epistemology seem meaningful and not farfetched. The key was building the whole course around Glaucon's question to Socrates in the Republic: "how then, shall we live?" Only the most unthinking person fails to understand and appreciate the force of this question. It is the question that fired my interest over forty years ago when I first stumbled upon philosophy and I find that returning to it and making it the center of my intro course is the most honest and direct way of making the case for why students should devote at least a little serious thought to abstract and difficult ideas.

What's wrong with professional philosophy in general and analytic philosophy in particular is that most professional philosophers now look down their noses at such a "juvenile" and "unprofessional" way of looking at philosophy. I cannot disagree more with this kind of elitism. Philosophy that strays too far from this root is merely self-indulgent sophistry.

Midpoint in the course

We have reached the midpoint of summer school. It's too soon to say whether my experiment of trying to emphasize the connection of metaphysics to ethics will spark more interest latter on because I haven't hit Descartes yet. When discussing Aristotle I stressed that his view of happiness is directly tied to his view of human nature and that what human nature really is does not seem to be merely a matter of opinion but rather some kind of objective fact. I think I was successful in getting them to see Aristotle's view of ethics as a live option for them. I don't think they see him as just another "dead white guy."

I introduce Epicureanism by comparing it with Buddhism. The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism represents a theory about human life that is both more radical and more negative than Epicureanism but extremely similar in its motivations.

A couple of highlights: "A stomach can be full but a bank account is never full." worked well as an illustration of the Epicurean doctrine about the difference between natural and socially conditioned desires. My comparison of Epicureans to potheads drew some smiles of recognition in my students.

I tried to show that these ideas are not locked into the past by briefly discussing Mill's attempts to answer the standard objections to Epicureanism a thousand years later. I also spoke about the paradox of hedonism and its possible connection with Mill's depression. "Since pleasure is the by-product of pursuing other goods when you desire pleasure itself you cut the ground from under your own feet. Pleasure become impossible."

I can say that I have at least a few students who seem intensely interested in the course thus far. Naturally there are also those who are obviously just taking the course to pick up a humanities credit and want nothing more than that. I'll have a better sense of how much this is sinking into their minds when I grade the midterm tomorrow.