My Foundations in Philosophy Courses This Fall

 This summer, I got asked again to teach two sections of the Foundations in Philosophy class at Marquette University.  This is my third time teaching this semi-new course, which replaces their Philosophy of Human Nature course (which was basically an Intro to Philosophy course, with a few added features).  This time around, I'm sticking with many of the thinkers and texts that I incorporated in last academic year's classes, but I'm also adding in a few new ones as well.

My viewers, followers, and subscribers usually express considerable interest in how I set up my classes, so I'm going to write a series of blog posts (and perhaps also shoot some videos) about each of the classes I'm teaching this Fall.  This is the first one in that series.

The Reading List

This list of required readings for the class will likely strike many as overly ambitious, particularly those who are more accustomed to seeing philosophy taught to beginners in pre-digested bit-size snippets in Intro to Philosophy textbooks.  My experience in teaching philosophy to non-majors for 20 years, in a wide range of settings, has shown me that students who apply themselves - and most importantly, who are given the right types of support - are up to studying primary texts in the field.

The Reading List For My Summer Online Existentialism Class

In just a bit over two weeks, I will be opening up my 6-week online summer course for Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design - Existentialist Philosophy and Literature.  Quite a few people have been asking about the reading list for the course, so I decided that it might be good for me to post it here.

Teaching any subject in 6 weeks is tough.  Even though they know it is an intensive class, you simply can't expect students to engage with the same quantity of reading as they would be able to handle in a 15 week semester.  This is even more the case for Philosophy classes, in which it often takes some time for the material to "sink in".

The class is divided into twelve modules, each roughly half of a week.  The first and last modules don't have assigned readings, since they're an introduction and conclusion to the class.  Each of the other 10 modules focuses on one important existentialist writer.

I had originally intended to give students 3 readings for each of those writer modules.  One of them would be required. One would be "supplementary" (students would have to read one of these per week).  And one would be "optional" (students would have to read one of these over the course of the class").  I decided instead to go with two readings per module - one required, and one optional (but students would need to engage with two optional ones over the six weeks).  The one exception is the Kierkegaard module, in which I'm still wavering about assigning two required texts.

So, here's the reading list:

Week 1, Unit 1 – What Is Existentialism?

• Optional secondary text readings on Existentialism

Week 1, Unit 2 - Soren Kierkegaard

• Required readings: The Crowd Is Untruth and The Present Age (selections)
• Supplemental Reading: Fear and Trembling

Week 2, Unit 1 – Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Required reading: Notes From Underground
• Supplemental Reading: The Brothers Karamazov (selections)

Week 2, Unit 2 – Friedrich Nietzsche

• Required reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 1
• Supplemental Reading: The Genealogy of Morals

Week 3, Unit 1 – Rainer Maria Rilke

• Required reading: Letters to a Young Poet
• Supplemental Reading: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Week 3, Unit 2 – Martin Heidegger

• Required reading: What Is Metaphysics?
• Supplemental Reading: The Origin of the Work of Art

Week 4, Unit 1 – Franz Kafka

• Required reading: The Metamorphosis
• Supplemental Reading: The Trial

Week 4, Unit 2 – Gabriel Marcel

• Required reading: On The Ontological Mystery
• Supplemental Reading: A Broken World

Week 5, Unit 1 – Albert Camus

• Required reading: The Myth of Sisyphus (selections)
• Supplemental Reading: The Stranger

Week 5, Unit 2 – Jean-Paul Sartre

• Required reading: Existentialism is a Humanism
• Supplemental Reading: Nausea

Week 6, Unit 1 – Simone de Beauvoir

• Required reading: The Second Sex (selections)
• Supplemental Reading: The Useless Mouths

Week 6, Unit 2 – Wrapping Up

• No required readings

I've been creating a lot of new core concept videos for my students in this class, some of which I've already early released to my Patreon supporters.  I'll be releasing those videos to the general public over the course of the summer as well.

Why Stop With Descartes' Second Mediation?

Here's a topic that I'll flesh out more fully in a fuller-length piece in my Medium site, hopefully later on this week - something that came first as a complete surprise to me, and then transformed into understandable dismay:  apparently, it is quite common for philosophy instructors to assign and teach only the first two of Rene Descartes' six Meditations on First Philosophy.

I discovered this when posting my recently released core concept videos focused on that very work.  People made comments that I thought were rather strange on the videos themselves and in the social media where I posted those videos.  Comments that sounded almost as if the people making them were familiar with Descartes' methodological doubt, the idea of the evil demon deceiving us, and the notion of the human being as thinking substance - but had no idea about all the other key ideas, arguments, distinctions that followed in the work.

When you stop short at that point in the work, then Descartes appears as a super-skeptic, or at the very least a skeptical idealist.  What ends up getting left out are: discussions about where our ideas come from, and whether we could be their unwitting source; an interesting argument for God's existence (and very much the "philosopher's God"); the invocation of clear and distinct ideas or conceptions as an epistemological criterion; consideration of how ideas can be true or false and where in the use of faculties falsity arises; an ethics of the use of the mind; exploration of the stock of innate ideas we have at our disposal; another, ontological argument for God's existence; reconstruction of the entire external world of extended substances. . .  and a few other things.

Why would a philosophy instructor who is good enough to their students to assign Descartes' Meditations only have them read the first two?  Surely it can't be because that instructor only read that far when they were a student, right?  Is it because they are uncomfortable with the "God-talk" that features heavily in Meditations 3 and 4?  It's not as if there isn't already a good bit of that in the earlier meditations.  Can it be that they think there is some legitimate pedagogical purpose served by reading just the start of a work then ignoring where the rest of that work goes, how the conclusions differ from the starting points, whether the problems raised find some resolutions?  That's hard to fathom as well

This bears more reflection on my part, which I hope to get to later this week.  I'll likely ask instructors who do teach just Meditations 1 and 2 in my social media whether they can provide some illumination on this matter as well.

Back To Being A Professor Again

The first half of my academic career, I held the rank of Assistant Professor.  While I taught for Ball State University in their extended education program - teaching Philosophy and Religious Studies classes at Indiana State Prison - that was the highest rank I could attain, since I wasn't tenure track, but rather had yearly contracts.  It was unfortunate, since given my publications at the time, I would have been eligible for promotion early on.

I taught for Ball State for six years, then after the Indiana DOC phased out college prison education, I moved down to Fayetteville State University, starting there as an Assistant Professor as well.  When I left after three years -  moving up to New York, where my then-fiancee resided - I would have been ready to apply early for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.

Instead, from that point on, I taught as an adjunct, first for Marist College (pretty continuously from 2011 to last Fall), then for several academic startups (Oplerno, the GCAS), and now more recently here in Milwaukee for Marquette University, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and Milwaukee Area Technical Institute.

Working as an adjunct is quite different in many respects from the much more secure, full-time, part-of-the-faculty status that comes with being a professor.  With the exceptions of a few academic institutions and systems (and this largely results from strong unions), adjuncts generally aren't paid particularly well and enjoy few (if not no) benefits.  They also can't count on continued employment.  Occasionally, classes assigned to them - sometimes even classes they developed - are poached by tenure-track professors who decide they would like to take them.

One place I've been teaching over the last year where adjuncts are particularly appreciated and thoughtfully taken care of, is the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  Then again, from what I can see, it's quite a well-run institution in general.  Highly student centered.  Administrators who clearly understand the mission of the school and who draw upon the talents of their faculty.  Good lines of communication.  All those aspects would already make it a good place to teach and work in my view.

But they also do things right when it comes to adjuncts.  In quite a few other places, if you are an adjunct, you're treated by tenure track faculty and administrators - though not by students (who often don't know who is an adjunct and who isn't) - as if you don't belong and are fortunate to be there at all.  At MIAD, you are invited in to nearly everything.  As far as I can tell, there's no divide existing between the full-time and part-time people.  MIAD provides us an adjunct office, stocked with tea and coffee, and we are encouraged to spend as much time as we'd like on campus.  The pay is good, and MIAD schedules upcoming classes well over a month before any of the other places I teach.

I got an email recently reminding all of us that, as adjuncts, we could and should apply for increase in rank.  The ranks at MIAD are Lecturer, then Adjunct Assistant Professor, Adjunct Associate Professor, and then finally Adjunct Professor.  Each of them represents a step up in status or title, but also an increase in payment per class.  I looked over the requirements for each rank, and then had to email my chair, because I wasn't sure whether the number of credit hours taught referred to hours taught at MIAD or elsewhere.  If just MIAD, I'd be at the lowest rank, but with 20 years of teaching, if the credit hours could be from elsewhere, I'd qualify for a much higher rank.

She wrote me back and informed me of something I'd been ignorant of the entire time I've been teaching for MIAD.  I came in at the highest rank.  I've been listed as an Adjunct Professor this entire time.  That was a welcome surprise to me!

It may seem like something rather trivial, but I've refrained from calling myself a philosophy professor for years, since officially, I didn't have that title, and I'm a rather literal person who's a bit of a stickler about truthfulness.  People would call me "professor", and sometimes I'd point out that technically speaking, I no longer could claim that title.  Now, however, I can call myself  and be called "professor" entirely in good faith.  And it's a small thing, but that feels quite good to me.

Thinkers and Texts I'm Teaching This Spring

This Spring, I'm returning to Marquette University, where I'll be teaching two sections of their new core class, Foundations in Philosophy.  Like many Catholic schools, their core curriculum has gone through recent changes that have reduced the number of required Philosophy courses (and Theology, and other courses in the humanities as well).  Having replaced both their Philosophy of Human Nature and their Ethics courses, this new Foundations course has to do quite a lot in one semester.

This is my second time around teaching Foundations, and in this interim between semesters, I've put quite a bit of thought into redesigning the course.  In a later blog post, I'll discuss what sorts of activities and assignments I've got lined up for my students.  But in this one - since I now my readers, viewers, and subscribers are always interested to know what the required readings are for the course, I thought I'd set them out here, adding a few reflections about why I made those selections.

So with no further ado, here's the list of thinkers and texts, indexed to the weeks and days of the term:

The Numbers Are In: It's Huxley, Stoker, and Bakker

Last week, after an initial round of suggestions, I held a runoff vote for the three fan-chosen authors I would add to the monthly talks in the Worlds of Speculative Fiction series for 2019.

The seven authors in the run-off were:  Bram Stoker, Thomas Ligoti, Stephen Donaldson, Katherine Kurtz, Aldous Huxley, Robert Jordan, and R Scott. Bakker.

Patreon supporters of my work got one additional vote.  Everyone who voted was allowed to choose up to three authors. There were 51 votes total in the runoff.

The big winner was Aldous Huxley, with 29 votes.  So, he will go into the October slot.  We'll be looking at his dystopian/utopian novels Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and Island.  We'll likely also discuss some of his essays as well, including The Perennial Philosophy.

Bram Stoker was the clear second place, with 19 votes.  He'll be in the November slot for the series.  We will, of course, be discussing his novel Dracula, his collection of short stories Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, and his later novels The Lady of the Shroud and the Lair of the White Worm.

Third place was a little closer. R. Scott Bakker got 13 votes. Thomas Ligotti and Robert Jordan each got 10 votes, so either of them could easily have slipped into that number 3 slot.  Next December, we'll be discussing his Prince of Nothing series of novels, The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior-Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought.

We now have the entire lineup for 2019 established.  Here it is:

• January – Edgar Allen Poe’s Uncanny Universe 
• February - G.K. Chesterton’s Novels of Rebellion and Intrigue 
• March - Mary Shelley’s Modern Worlds 
• April – Lewis Carroll’s Fantastical Lands 
• May – Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth 
• June – Piers Anthony’s Xanth Novels 
• July – Gordon Dickson’s Childe Cycle Novels 
• August – August Derleth’s Universe of the Cthulhu Mythos 
• September – Karl Edward Wagner’s Ancient World of Kane 
• October – Aldous Huxley’s Utopias and Dystopias 
• November – Bram Stoker’s World of Gothic Horror 
• December – R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing Series

Remember that we have a FREE open-access online course for the series, where you can watch the videos, access resources and links, find out any news about the ongoing series, and interact with others about the series, the authors, and the books.

Texts and Authors I'm Teaching This Fall

We're now at the end of Week 2 of the classes I'm teaching locally for Marquette University and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.  Many readers, viewers, subscribers, supporters, and other fans have expressed curiosity about the thinkers and texts we're covering in my Foundations in Philosophy (Marquette) and Philosophies of Human Nature (MIAD) classes, so I thought I'd take a bit of time and discuss those a bit.

There is a good bit of overlap in the material covered in these two classes, and there's several reasons for that.  Every one of the texts and authors we're reading and discussing is someone I think well worth engaging with for a student just beginning in philosophy.  Some of them are thinkers I've previously developed resources on when I taught them in the past, so I have good handouts, lesson page, or videos ready at hand. And, since I'm teaching a LOT this semester, I wanted to keep from having two entirely different preps for these two classes.

So for all of you who have been inquiring about my classes - and anyone else who is interested in the matter - here's the reading lists, followed by a bit more about new resources I'm developing not only for those academic classes, but also for my other online students, as well as for the general public.

A Perennial Problem - Which Texts to Teach?

Exactly a week ago, I was asked by Marquette University whether I could take on teaching two sections of Ethics, which start next week.  I happily agreed, since I do enjoy face-to-face classroom teaching, and it is just a bit over a mile walk to campus. I'm particularly glad to be teaching Ethics

Ethics is one of my main areas of specialized expertise.  I have been teaching Ethics courses of various sorts my entire career - the very first college course I taught, in fact, was a section of Ethics.  It is also one main field of my scholarly research and publication, a subject-matter I provide talks and workshops upon, and an area that much of my video-content has focused upon.  In addition, I engage in Ethics in applied and practical ways, working as a philosophical counselor, an ethics consultant, and an executive coach.

This is a field to which I continually give a lot of thought, and leading college freshmen into some the key ideas, distinctions, thinkers, and texts is a responsibility I take very seriously.  One of my main goals for the class - and hopes for each of my students - is to help them become lifelong learners in Ethics.  I want them not only to retain at least some of what we've studied five years down the line, when they find themselves needing it, but also to continually build upon the foundation that our all-too-brief course provides them.

Just Reached 100 Videos On Stoic Philosophy!

In the last two weeks, I have released five short videos discussing key ideas of Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes.  Here's where two main focuses of my work in recent years come together.  One of these involves studying, applying, and teaching about Stoic philosophy.  The other is producing popular online videos on a wide range of thinkers, texts, and topics in philosophy.

Adding in those Stoic Paradoxes videos to the many others I have created brings the total today to exactly 100!  I don't expect to rest on my laurels - I'll be producing many more! - but I do feel that reaching that number is a significant milestone that deserves some celebration.

You can find all 100 videos assembled in one massive YouTube playlist - Ancient Philosophy: The Stoic School - but for those who would like that list broken down into categories, you can find some of those below.  In addition to that - for any viewers who would like to support my ongoing video production - I'll put in a plug for my new Patreon page.

Patreon Crowdfunding - Why I Created My Page

As some readers may already know, I recently made a Patreon page to support my work creating free high-quality philosophy content online.  The resources I've created - videos, blog posts, articles, handouts, even free courses, among others - have helped tens of thousands of people all over the world understand difficult philosophical ideas, thinkers, and texts.

That work demands considerable time, energy, and thought on my part - and I've been happy to devote all three of those over the last six years, not least because I see (and in many cases, read) how much of an impact resources I've developed and offered to the public for free have had on so many people's grades, minds, and even lives.

Actually, I can't take most of the credit for this impact on learners.  What allows me to create materials explaining philosophy to others is precisely the existence of those brilliant philosophers and rich texts that I focus upon!  Provided I do my own job well, it is really Plato, or Hegel, or Epictetus who is doing the heavy lifting  (as I've discussed in another post here).

Viewers, subscribers, and social media followers have been expressing gratitude for the work that I do, and some of them have been suggesting that I create a Patreon page to allow them to support that ongoing work in tangible ways.  So that's precisely what I've done - you can check it out here, or watch my video about it here.   If you enjoy my work or find it useful - and you want to give something back - or if you recognize the value it brings to many other people - and you want to help me continue and expand it - then you should consider becoming one of my Patreon supporters!

New Online Epictetus Course Enrolling!

I'm very happy to be able to report that we now have a third online ReasonIO course starting up soon, and enrolling now - focused on a set of classic Stoic texts  Epictetus' Enchiridion and Discourses!

The class begins officially on Sunday, July 24 with the introductory class sessions (carried out through video-conferencing), but I'll be opening the first course modules a week for students before the class starts.  It is a six-week, entirely online

We'll be starting the course with some general discussion of Stoicism as a movement, and then focusing on the shorter work, the Enchiridion for the entire first week.  Each week following that, we will work through one of the four books of the Discourses.  Then, we'll finish with a full week devoted to further in-depth discussion of student-selected topics in Epictetus' Stoic philosophy.

Plato's Symposium Class Now Enrolling

As the Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics class gets close to finishing up, we've opened up enrollment for another online class, this time on Plato's Symposium!

I'm very happy to be teaching this 4-week entirely online class again with a new group of students for a number of reasons, but I'll just mention two of those reasons here.

One of them is that this is a Platonic dialogue that I'm particularly interested in.  Each time that I teach it, I learn something new in the process.  And I love initiating new readers into this very rich, complexly crafted philosophical text - getting to see their own reactions, their puzzles, and eventually their own articulated understanding of the speeches Plato places in his character's mouths, all about that most important of topics - Love.

Free Resources on Plato's Symposium

Back in the month of August, I taught a 4-week online course for the Global Center for Advanced Studies on Plato's Symposium -- a very enjoyable class, involving excellent student discussions!

When it comes to designing online classes, I'm a bit on the over-achiever side.  For every 2-hour videoconference class session, I produce a 25-40 slide presentation.  I also create video content, lesson pages, and handouts on the material we're studying.  Ok. . . so more than a bit . . . But my obsession is your gain, since I'm posting some of those resources here, free of charge, open-access.

Appointment to the Faculty of GCAS

I'm happy to announce that the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) has recently appointed me to their faculty.  I'm hoping to offer me first course with them starting in April, and then start developing additional courses to be offered later during the 2015 year.

GCAS is a new educational institution -- and a new kind of educational institution -- something that is sorely needed in our deeply damaged educational landscape.  They have brought together a faculty that includes internationally recognized scholars from a variety of fields, innovative theorists, educators willing to contribute their work towards projects advancing the common good.  In fact, one of the features I find most attractive about GCAS is their conception of education as integral to the common good.

Here's some links to further information about GCAS:

• Their Mission Statement
• Their Faculty page
• A list of Recent Courses
• Their For Students page

What I'll be doing with GCAS is designing and teaching online courses, in which I'll be doing the sort of work I've become known for through my YouTube videos -- taking difficult or complex philosophical thinkers and texts and making them accessible to a wide range of students.  Possibly down the line I might develop some classes focused specifically upon topics that I'm currently researching, for example one examining theories of anger.  But for the time being, there's plenty to do in building foundational courses, and that's a project and prospect I'm very much looking forward to.

A New Class: Philosophical World Views and Values

This marks my fourth year teaching classes in Philosophy and Religious Studies for Marist College.  The last three years have involved a mix of face-to-face and online classes -- this current academic year, however, I decided to switch entirely to teaching online for Marist.  There's a whole story behind that decision, which perhaps I'll tell in a later post -- suffice it to say that one of the main reasons was to afford me greater flexibility and more time to devote to doing more innovative work in Philosophy -- bringing it into practice, and putting it before a broader public.

In early December, I start teaching a new 10-week online course -- World Views and Values.  It's essentially a variation on Intro to Philosophy, but it's one which transfer students have traditionally taken in place of Intro (which has since been renamed "Philosophical Perspectives"!), and it bears a different course description: 

This course will help students to ask basic questions about the ultimate meaning of life, to take a comprehensive and holistic world view, and to articulate a coherent values system. The basic methodology for teaching the course is comparative and socioanalytic. 

So really, a lot of leeway there for doing what one would like with the course.  I decided to put a lot of thought into designing precisely the sort of course I think might be most useful and interesting for the students -- and enjoyable for me to put together and teach.

The "Glimpses into Existence" Series So Far

Last night, I wrote a short post about a Simone de Beauvoir talk in one of my other more specialized blogs, Sadler's Existentialism Updates (SEU) -- an electronic forum originally intended for me to set down ideas about the online course on Existentialist Philosophy and Literature which I was (and admittedly still am) developing.  There's an interesting story to be told about that, of course, but it's already available over there on SEU, so no sense reposting it here -- at least not until I've actually got a course up and running.

Instead, I'd like to write a bit about the monthly series of talks on Existentialism -- the recent de Beauvoir talk being the tenth session -- that I've been providing at the Kingston Library this year.  We decided to call the talks "Glimpses into Existence," since each session would introduce a general, library-going (so educated and interested) audience to some of the main works, key ideas, and contributions, as well as the times and cultural setting of one important Existentialist thinker.  Devoting one-and-a-half to two hours of discussions to thinkers like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, or Sartre -- well, that really is just a glimpse into their thoughts, writings, and lives.

Hello Again From Saas-Fee!

A bit under a year ago, I decided to put my blogging endeavors on hold -- announced in the post just below this one -- including this one, my oldest blog.  It has indeed been a year packed with projects and opportunities, changes and events. 

The medium in which I've done the most work in that time -- outside of the interactions of the classroom and course management system -- has been video, specifically producing, releasing, and curating mainly philosophy-related videos in my YouTube channel.  But, I've also been engaged in considerably more public speaking, brought into interesting conversations as a consultant, and even found some time for working on a few articles and book chapters.  At Google's invitation, I began offering 1-on-1 video Helpout sessions.   I also became certified by the American Philosophical Practioner's Association in philosophical counseling -- something I'd found myself doing occasionally in less formal and structured ways for years -- and am now in process of developing a practice, based physically in the Hudson Valley, but virtually able to engage clients nearly anywhere in the world.

As exciting as everything has been, I've missed getting to do the kind of writing -- as well as resource development -- that the rather over-ambitiously rolled out blogs of the past afforded me chances to work on.  So, as my 44th birthday, and along with it this trip over the Atlantic and across the Alps, approached, I decided it was time to start contributing to those electronic forums again -- as well as to reconsider and streamline their designs. 

Sadler's Existentialist Updates needed attending to first, since I've been doing a lot of lecturing and course development precisely on that philosophical movement -- and after redesigning it in minor ways, I started writing again -- and, after a hiatus of ten months, it felt great to post content again!  I also realized that I'd actually need to create another new blog, Half Hour Hegel, sooner than later in order to organize the video content of an ongoing, probably 3-year-to-complete series of a (projected) 250 to 300 videos working methodically through G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  So I did it.

The question was then which blog to start work on next.  I'd hoped by this birthday I might find enough time to restart another blog that I had "given" myself  as a kind of birthday present last year, Heavy Metal Philosopher -- and I am looking forward to getting to write again in that one soon.  But, given the time that was available to me, it seemed to me that this one -- my longest running, my first, my most comprehensive site -- was really the one to refurbish and restart today.

As I write this, I'm high up in the Swiss Alps, in Saas-Fee, where European Graduate School has its campus, and where they are holding intensive classes and hosting lectures, taught by some of the cutting-edge theorists and practitioners of continental philosophy -- a program in which my wife and collaborator is enrolled.  I'm here for her last week, attending some of the lectures, meeting and conversing with some of the students and professors, traipsing around the narrow mountain streets, gaping like a tourist up at the massive, snow-brilliant peaks, slowly recollecting enough of my German to get by in the shops, and doing some work of my own -- a bit of writing, shooting some video footage, and . . . well, this!

So I'll be back to using this as my sounding-board for ideas I'm working out or working on, occasional reflections on perennial matters spurred by current events, and for mentioning some of the other projects I've got going on, when there's something to say about them.  There's a lot of forward movement, as they say, but that almost appears to require time as its fuel or compensation.  Given the degree to which I'm finding those days, hours, and minutes allotted, demanded, parceled out, I expect I'm going to have to write in a somewhat less polished -- some might say, laborious -- style than that I've indulged myself in here during past years.  But, perhaps that's all to the good . . .

Virtue Ethics Digest: Are The Virtues Already In Us?

Over in one of my other blogs, Virtue Ethics Digest, I've got a recent set of reflections spurred by a certain misreading or misunderstanding which I see consistently appearing in certain of my students' papers, Are The Virtues Already In Us?  It represents what seems to me a characteristically late modern manner of getting virtue (and thereby also vice, moral development, decision, and a number of other key concepts in moral theory) wrong.  Here's a brief excerpt:

The kind of mistake I'm referring to, in its simplest, most bare bones form, runs like this:  The specific virtues are traits or capabilities any given human being already possesses, and in any given situation he or she needs simply to use their virtues to choose and act well.  So, there's really two claims being asserted, or more often, simply assumed on the part of the student.  Human beings already have the virtues.  And, whatever these virtues are, one just needs to use them.

Elements of Philosophy: What Do Philosophers Do?

 A new academic year has commenced, and I'm currently in process of producing some new lesson content for my Introduction to Philosophy students -- which this semester is themed on "Love, Friendship, and Desire.  Right now, its the very most introductory material for the class that I am writing and posting as lessons in our course management system.  Since I don't use a textbook for the class, but rather supply all the readings, resources, lessons, videos, and other sundries for the class within that course shell, it's critical that I provide these undergraduate, non-major students, many of them first-semester freshmen, with some idea early on just what the class is about -- what kind of approach we are taking, what kinds of activities we are engaged in, what sorts of tools we employ.

So, in addition to a number of other similar lesson sections -- some already (thankfully!) written, some of them still pressing items of my to-do list -- I decided to try my hand at explaining what we philosophers (and those who we're reading and studying) actually do, by way of discussing some of our most common tools -- the "elements," if you like, of philosophical work and works.  After I was finished with it, I thought that others might find it interesting or useful -- or perhaps glimpse better than I any glaring omissions or oversights.  So, if you've got something to add to this, by all means feel free to set it down in a comment, and I may incorporate it in a revised version of the online lesson.

Streamlining Life, Thinking, and Writing

If you're a long-term reader of this blog -- or of my other main philosophy blog, Virtue Ethics Digest -- you may have noticed a relative paucity of posts over the last year or so, a lower degree of productivity (or at least prolixity) than previously.  If you're a new reader to this blog, of course, you need only look to the sidebar post archive list, where you can see the numbers.  In either case, you might wonder why that has been the case, and whether or not this is the "new normal," as they say.

You might also have noticed a rather startling change to the look and even feel and function of the blog.  It started out as something like a playground or preserve for philosophical musings and rants, and for about two years I've done more or less what I liked with aesthetics, content,  even eventually scheduling.  Really a decision -- or at least a dissatisfaction -- coming down the pike for a long time, matters finally came to a head this Thanksgiving break, as I reflected on what else I've wanted to do with Orexis Dianoētikē, what I wanted to make of it.  I wanted something considerably more disciplined, focused, well-integrated with my other projects and purposes . . .  streamlined, you might say.  That's reflective of a broader resolve, one extending to (and through) numerous aspects of my own life, incorporating Orexis Dianoētikē within that larger reorientation.