Introductory Philosophy - A Student's Perspective

Anyone who knows me knows I love philosophy. I am currently getting a minor in philosophy along with my bachelor's degree, and plan on continuing my education with a graduate degree in philosophy. The following is my take on how introductory philosophy courses should be taught. Of course, I have absolutely no expertise in either education or philosophy, but this is my opinion as a student (I do have some expertise in being a student, at least!).

There is a stigma about philosophy - people often say it is boring or pointless or bullshit. I find this very odd. Most of the very same people have strong philosophical positions and will use philosophical argumentation to defend those positions (a friend I had who called philosophy bullshit but would use the argument from design to defend his belief in god comes to mind). There are very few people who don't find philosophical discussions of some kind at least a bit interesting. So why is there this stigma?

As a student, I've taken a number of philosophy courses. There is a definite trend in the way any introductory course to a subject in philosophy is taught. They are almost always taught historically. Knowing some history of philosophy is great, and I am not trying to say it isn't of any use. However, historical philosophy isn't the way to hook people new to the subject!

Much of what Socrates said is only really historically important - his theory of forms is sort of interesting, but pretty much any modern reader being introduced to philosophy would just scoff at it. Before we had developed scientific methods and a rich scientific understanding of the universe, much of philosophy was arm-chair philosophy. Philosophers would make grand claims about the way the world was from their proverbial arm-chairs without having these claims substantiated with a rich understanding of the world. This was fine for those times - they were doing the best they could for their time. But taken as a hypothesis nowadays, many philosophical theories that were put forth at some time seem naive and rest on strange assumptions about the way the world works. When put into context with all the scientific knowledge we now have, they just don't seem to cohere well with what we know now. It's hard to describe exactly why the ideas seem stupid because much of the time there isn't anything that directly contradicts them, it's just that much of our understanding makes the theory unlikely and it is hard to articulate (especially for someone new to philosophy) exactly why a theory seems ridiculous.

This makes philosophy seem pointless - all these philosophers just seem to be sitting around making stupid claims! It gives the impression that this is what philosophy is about. The frustrating claims made suck the fun out of philosophical argumentation. To top things off, all the theories seem to be bullshit.

Talking about old philosophical theories isn't always bad, though. Much ancient philosophy is quite good and can still be enlightening now - to take one example out of many, the problem of evil which was first articulated by Epicurus over two thousand years ago (I don't know if he was the first to put forward this argument, but if not that just further shows that really really old philosophy can be good). This argument is still essential in any philosophical discussion of gods. However, another problem in many introductory philosophy courses is to force students to read a translation of the original author. Even the best of translations are often hard to understand, vague to the point that the professor doesn't know exactly what the author is saying, and use strange analogies and examples that make little sense to the modern reader.

This just compounds the frustration. It's one thing to teach frustrating theories, but to make students read hard-to-understand writings just makes it annoying and boring to study philosophy.

When I first got into philosophy, the book I read was The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law. This book, I think, takes the perfect approach to teaching philosophy. It starts out with the sort of question that would intrigue anyone - the sort of question you and your buddies might argue about sometime (like "Is time travel possible?" "Does god exist?" "Is homosexuality wrong?" "Can robots feel?" etc). It then goes on in a playful dialogue-style, with 2 people each taking side in the issue. It goes through different arguments in an easy to read way, sometimes using historical arguments, sometimes using modern arguments. This makes it very engaging and thought-stimulating.

The interest in philosophy is in every student. Teachers and professors need to take advantage of this, engage the students in a way that will interest them. Concise, engaging readings will encourage students far more than boring historical ones. Topics should be chosen that would actually be interesting for students to discuss. I think this can all be done in an engaging way while still teaching students critical thinking and good argumentation.

So maybe I am just naive about the process of educating students, but this is my opinion as a student. I'm sure things are much more complicated than I make them out to be (it must be hard to make structured lectures with a lot of student participation, and even harder to decide how to mark students if the lectures lacked many facts), but ideally, I think this is how an introductory philosophy course should be taught.