If this was a good idea someone else would have thought of it, right?

First-year philosophy papers are awful. Oh there are a some that are pleasant to read, and a few that are interesting, and a smaller group that are both. But on the whole, they aren’t very good.

This is not because the students are awful. Of course, some students are awful. But the ratio of awful papers to awful students is not 1:1. It is (warning: totally made up statistic) more like 20:1.

How did it get to be September?

And what cruel unfeeling deity decided I would be sick for the first week of classes? Let us hope nothing I say fever addled is remembered come next Monday.

Teaching 2008/2009

Fall

• 379 Logic II
  A formal logic consists of a symbolic language together with a semantics, which captures the possible meanings or truth-conditions of the language, and a deductive system, which aims to capture which inferences are correct. In this course we study the scope and limits of formal logic by examining the relationship between these three parts of a logic. The major results to be presented include soundness (“the deductive system captures only truths”), completeness (“the deductive system captures all the truths”), undecidability (“there is no mechanical procedure for establishing whether or not an argument is valid”), and the Löwenheim-Skolem theorems (which concern some of the limits on the expressive power of first-order logic). Along the way we will study some set theory, recursive functions, Turing-machines, the limits of computation, and (if time permits) second-order logic.  The course is fast paced and students are expected to supplement lectures with significant independent study.
• 409 Abelard and Heloise: sex, love, and celibacy
  The story of Abelard and Heloise is among history’s most famous romances: an illicit love-affair followed by an illegitimate child and a secret marriage, an act of violent revenge by Heloise’s relatives, and then lifelong separation when both entered religious life. This soap-opera worthy story was however underpinned by a deep intellectual relationship. Letters between the lovers both before and after their separation discussed the nature of friendship and love, the duties lovers had to each other, the institution of marriage, conflict between sexual desire and virtue, and the connection between romantic love and the love of God. The course will address these issues as raised in the letters, the Ciceronian discussions of love and friendship that inspired Heloise, various discussions of the nature of love from contempories of  the lovers, and Abelard’s own philosophical writings on the nature of  friendship.
• 595 Honours Seminar
  Writing seminar for honours students in their thesis year.
• 595 Speech Act Theory
  Reading course, closed enrollment.

Winter

• 201 Problems of Philosophy
  An introduction to philosophy by means of an examination of questions that arise out of our interactions with the external world and with other people.  Questions such as ‘what kind of creatures are we?’, ‘how can I know what the world is like?’, ‘how should groups of people live together?’, etc., are often raised and examined in popular media like books, movies, and television shows, and this course will approach these questions by means of these popular illustrations and then look at the responses of both classical and contemporary philosophers.
• 379 Logic II
  See the one for fall.

A man with a martini glass walks into a bar …

I’m teaching Analytic Philosophy this year. It’s an odd sort of course, set up like a history course in its scope (Frege to Gettier!), and yet covering material still recent enough that there isn’t the kind of secondary literature that we often use to guide us through a period. That literature is only just getting started. Of course to add to the difficulty, I decided to start with philosophy of language. Intellectually that makes some sense, since language is a central issue for almost everyone in the period. But Russell, Frege and Strawson don’t make for an easy start to the term, especially since some of the students have only one prior course in philosophy.  Worse, unlike Gillian Russell, who has some good ideas for starting a philosophy of language course, I don’t have a whole term to talk about these issues, but instead a paultry three weeks.

This has meant I have had to be creative. So I have been turning the various examples in the literature into group exercises, which have worked surprisingly well. Now if only I can figure out how to do this for the metaphysics section! I include two examples that worked particularly well (both inspired by Donnellan) under the fold.

A teaching philosophy blog

Here’s a little plug for a new-to-me blog devoted to the teaching of philosophy: Metatome.