Some Problems with Philosophy: Post Script

Today we effectively concluded the first "unit" in my intro class, which had as its central focus an exploration of the attitude of philosophy. Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, we decided that philosophy done well (and rightly oriented) does four things: (1) it adds to our store of knowledge and fills out our education, (2) it examines familiar things in an unfamiliar light, (3) it questions and challenges tradition, and (4) it provides -- somehow -- ways of coping with our everyday experience. I've asked them to write a short paper indicating which of the following thinkers they think best exemplifies the philosophical attitude: Thales, Socrates, Plato, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. The conversation over the last two weeks has been really exceptional in this class -- at 7:00am! -- so we've really been able to explore these ideas using the Pojman text. I'm really looking forward to their written responses.

At the end of our discussion today I broached the topic of preparedness, talking with them a little bit about why they think "now" (being in college, growing as a young adult, etc) is the right time to read philosophy. They really surprised me with their answers, which were all along the lines of their minds being ready to accept the abstract nature of these ideas, their force and the lens philosophy provides to reorganize their experience. What struck me was first of all, how frank they were in recognizing the way philosophy fits with and for them. I couldn't help but think of the poverty of my assessment below, in the sense that the way I've viewed this "unpreparedness" is a half-empty proposition. They come at the class feeling intellectually prepared -- like now is the time when philosophy will make sense. I've made an inverted assumption about my students, and today I'm pleasantly surprised.

Some Problems with Philosophy

In a comment to my post below on Retooling, Ted makes the following point:

I wonder why some Christians lose their faith when they take philosophical courses. I knew a very intelligent guy, who was a very committed Christian, who took philosophy (I think he majored in it) at a well known Christian school. It seemed to throw him for a loop, and he dropped out of attending church for some time (years, I believe), before coming back. An aside question, so forgive me. I do remember that Francis Schaeffer told his students that when reading philosophy, they needed to be reading twice as much in Scripture (or something to that effect).

If I had faced this important point about three years or so ago, I would say immediately because in general, the church doesn't teach people to think. Now, though, I think it is a bit more complicated in the sense that no college student is adequately prepared for their first philosophy class, except in very rare cases. Reading primary-source philosophy is so challenging to students because it's not at all clear why these thinkers are asking the questions they are. We live in a culture where other kinds of inquiry are prized, and the insularity of discipline and specialization are encouraged. Science, math, philosophy, and theology or religious studies are not integrated the way they were in earlier periods of Western history. Somehow in our contemporary mind, these issues are either already settled or not worth thinking about (because they don't quite make a buck).

Certainly the contemporary Christian life requires balance and integration of rational inquiry and spiritual examination (although they are in no way opposed to one another), but our experiences as young Christians are heavy on the spiritual side. We fail to recognize the integrated nature of our intellectual heritage, and in doing so fail to prepare for the different ways in which individuals have answered questions that we've already answered in certain ways. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but my recent experience as a teacher indicates a general unpreparedness for the problems philosophy is concerned to answer.

In my intro class this semester, I've let the book do the leading in the sense that Pojman begins by discussing the proper attitude that philosophy requires. I'm hoping that by challenging students on an attitudinal level, the ground might be prepared for accepting philosophical problems and criticizing their proposed solutions. The perpetual challenge for the individual teaching philosophy is to train people to take philosophy out of the classroom, instead of engendering an hour and fifteen minute period twice a week where we suspend our regular lives and questions in favor of these more speculative issues. How does philosophy become influential for living and not a mere thought experiment?

Retooling (2): Extended Version

Yesterday I made some choices w/r/t the primary source texts I'm considering for my new and improved Intro to Philosophy course. I'm probably going to narrow down this list, but I won't be able to tell until I read them.

• Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (Hackett)
• Plato, Five Dialogues (Hackett) -- I'm looking to this especially for the Euthyphro and the Phaedo
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Hackett)
• Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations (Cambridge)
• Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hackett)
• Mill, On Liberty (again, Hackett)
• Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (and finally, Hackett)

Notice what's missing...I had to suppress a very strong urge to include George of Cloyne's Principles Concerning Human Understanding (Me: yes kids, there is no such thing as matter...it's all in your head! Students: thanks for nothing!) and Kant's Groundwork. I want them to learn, not run from philosophy screaming.

On another note, this process started an interesting conversation between another early-morning colleague and I. I mentioned my interest in changing my course to employ all primary source material, and I asked him about his thoughts on the subject. He uses two of the books I propose above (and several more, I would guess), and he mentioned that using these makes the teacher/lecturer necessary and useful. While I'm not entirely sure he meant it this way, I took this comment to be an attempt at helping the students understand what the role of the teacher is in a philosophy class.

I guess I have always thought it a little unfair -- and hence my reticence to use the primary texts -- to give students walking into a field with which they have had little or no interaction (what, you didn't have a philosophy class in high school?) a set of texts that are by nature difficult and oblique. There was an occasion in college when, in a medieval philosophy class, we were given quite possibly some of the most challenging (and in some cases, almost unreadable to the undergraduate eye) texts possible, with the expectation that we would rely on the wisdom of the professor to navigate us through these difficult waters. The idea of professor-as-sage is something that is generally unwarranted...especially for a lowly MA like myself. My fear has always been that I would be selling my students a false bill of goods, and that I wouldn't be able to get them through the texts at all, much less do it wisely or with any sagacity (whoa).

On the other hand, the thing that leaves me so dissatisfied with the textbook approach is that the professor becomes virtually useless to the average student who pays attention while s/he reads and "gets it." I, and subsequently the time spent in class, end up being redundant for these students, and that troubles me a little. Of course, I make what effort I can to extend the text as far as I can but I'm not actually sure whether my students are -- on this approach -- learning philosophy or learning about philosophy. There's a difference.

On Karen's advice I've been trying to consider a question or an aspect of philosophy that motivates me in order to develop a theme for my class. It occurred to me this week while teaching about relativism and moral nihilism (I'm really digging the metaethics right now) that one thing of importance to me is progress. How is it that we change, and change for the better? Like we always said at the Seminary, philosophy is at the lower-layer of most things, and I think it it can -- in most of its forms -- inspire change and transformation. I hear the voice of the wisest person I've ever had the privilege of learning from mumbling in the back of my head, "thou requirest a little lower layer..."

Anyway, I'm curious what you think of my central question and my selected texts. What has been your experience (or recollection for all you Platonists out there) with primary sources and primary texts in introductory classes of any sort? Any words of wisdom, my friends?Also, thanks to some prodding from Keith, anyone can comment. Just keep it clean here, people. Leave the swearing to me.

On Philosophy, Common Sense, Transformation

I'm really excited about one of the textbooks I'm using this semester (Louis Pojman's, Philosophy: The Pursuit of Wisdom, 5/e). In his first chapter he tackles the question, "What is Philosophy?" No small potatoes there. On the second page of the chapter, he quotes Bertrand Russell, who says:

The [person] who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason...While diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, [philosophy] greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive the sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar light.

This passage perfectly captures what it is to teach philosophy and be transformed by it. However, the transformee must be open and willing to -- as Dr. Gordon Lewis is famous for saying -- follow the truth wherever it leads. It wasn't clear how much of a prima facie risk this "following the truth is" for those just walking in to a philosophy class. It's easy for me to champion that cause and talk about it during the first week of class, but it is another thing to draw students through that process and do so continuously over sixteen weeks. Furthermore, being enthusiastic about the ideas and helpful dispositions of philosophy is only good if people are willing to go along. Yet another reason why sometimes teaching philosophy is like selling something. It's still hard to tell who is buying.

There's an interesting move occurring now that I am a moderately-established adjunct that involves groups of us turning into groups of colleagues, and my group includes one full-time faculty member (the one who happened to evaluate me last semester) as well. We visit in the morning, sharing our woes and frustrations about early-morning students, the bookstore somehow managing to screw up a crucial book order, and the overall ridiculousness of text-messagers and sleeping students. (If you're tired and have difficulty getting out of bed, why -- pray tell -- did you sign up for a 7:00am class?)

Restart, Retool, Routine

Tomorrow the business starts up again. I'm grateful for the month I get between classes, but in a lot of ways it has seemed eternal. I blame it all on the snow. Three preps (Intro, Ethics, critical reasoning) should be pretty exciting, and will manage to keep me honest. I like the challenge of the things I'm teaching, and the fact that I'm using all new textbooks all around will be pretty wild.

During a fabulous lunch on Friday, I was discussing with a friend of mine my desire to revamp the Intro class to integrate primary texts only -- and lose the "textbook" approach. The deal with primary texts is always scary. In the wrong hands, they can make philosophy seem impenetrable and/or ruin a class. In the right hands, though, they can keep a class interesting and/or make it a transformative experience for the students. My fear is the former, that my inexperience teaching might somehow screw up whatever I might bring to the texts. I fear I don't know the texts well enough to use them independently of any all-in-one anchor. When asked for advice, my friend says to choose a theme and work from there. I'm already thinking ahead to next Fall when my new-and-improved class will debut. I just can't think of a theme. It's funny, but the lack of an immediately-apparent theme for an intro to philosophy class goes directly to the unmoored nature of my own interests in philosophy. I'm not quite sure where I fit or what I want to study. Everything is interesting!

This week is about setting and getting acclimated to a routine. Absent a routine, things get weird. I sleep strange hours, I get headaches, I obsess about things that aren't as pressing as they seem at the moment (thanks a lot, Michael Pollan), I stop writing interesting blog posts, etc. The trick this time around is to integrate some of my long-term projects into the routine. Maybe once a typical day is established, I can overlay some thoughtful work in writing, thinking, and spiritually forming on the procedure.

I expect things to be slow (*gasp!*) around here for the next week or so, but I'll post from the trenches when I can.

Virtual Images, Actual Reality, Ways of Seeing

This post (and the comments) over at the Constructive Curmudgeon taps into an idea I've been stewing about for awhile. It links up with a question fundamental to my current way of thinking: do digitally-created images have moral consequences?

If images have moral consequences, then it seems that there needs to be an acknowledgement of the kind of ontological reality of these images. It's fairly uncontroversial from a philosophical angle to argue that digital torture is problematic because it still resembles something in the non-virtual (real) world. This correspondence view of matching images to their referents seems to make sense. A kind of realism is necessary in order to draw meaningful (i.e., non-relative) moral conclusions. If we adopt the correspondence view, then it is equally uncontroversial to make a moral judgment about digitally-generated child pornography.

But what I want to point out is that outside of philosophical circles, realism and correspondence are not necessarily the primary ways of reading images. In fact, positing a correspondence between images and referents is viewed as relying on a parochial way of "seeing" the image--in particular, from a white, male, western perspective. Even if we acknowledge the limitations of correspondence views, saying "Yes, I am aware that the tradition locates correspondence as priveliged, but I'm going to use it anyway," can we transcend the limitations?

My film theory professor posed this problem to me in her comments on my term paper. If we emphasize a visual-epistemological system that holds to correspondence first and gender or culture second, are we limiting (or worse, ignoring) the insights of feminist or anti-colonialist film theory? How do we integrate these ideas to build a full-orbed interpretive framework?

All this (rambling?) points to the issues of (a) resuscitating a correspondence view as a meaningful way of seeing the world--a position which in fact may not need resuscitating, and (b) developing a correspondence view that translates to adequately accomodate more than it's often given credit for.

Helpful discussions of the relationship between digital images and correspondence (or "perceptual realism") are by Stephen Prince. See especially his "True Lies: Digital Images, Perceptual Realism, and Film Theory," and "Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator" in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

movies seen since late August

AV here...

I 'm responding to a challenge issued by the administrator of this blog. I've been keeping a simple list of films I've seen this year using a format from "The Academic Hack," Michael Sicinski." He runs a great website, linked above and is way out of my league.

(- seen on video; / repeat viewing; [v] video piece; [p] paracinema (installation, etc.); [s] short, under 30 minutes; * grade changed upon repeat viewing)

December
Thank You for Smoking (Jason? Reitman, 2005) [4]
The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006) [4]
- /The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) [9*]
- Kiss of Death (Henry Hathaway, 1947) [6]
- The Weather Man (Gore Verbinski, 2006) [5]
- The Constant Gardner (Fernando Meirelles, 2005) [4]
- Days of Heaven (Terence Malick, 1978) [9]
- Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2003) [7]

November
Old Well (Wu Tian Ming, 1986) [7]
The King of Masks (Wu Tian Ming, 1996) [8]
George Kuchar @DIFF
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006) [7]
Suzan Pitt: Persistence of Vision (1979-2006) [6]
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Kunuk and Cohn, 2006) [7]
- Koko: A Talking Gorilla (Barbet Schroeder. 1978) [6]
EMPz 4 Life (Allan King, 2006) [7]
Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006) [8]
Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, 2006) [8]
Invisible Wave (Pen Ek Ratanruang, 2006) [7]
Steve Anker @FPC w/ films from CalArts
- Pandora's Box (GW Pabst, 1929) [8]
- The Double Life of Veronique (Krzystof Kieslowski, 1991) [7]
- The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2006) [8]

October
Nathaniel Dorsky @FPC
Song and Solitude "[Song and Solitude's] balance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, than an exploration of the external visual world as such." 16mm, 2005-06, 21 min
Threnody "Threnody is the second of two devotional songs the first being The Visitation. It is an offering to a friend who died." 16mm, 2003-04, 20 min
The Visitation "... an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one's psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts." 16mm, 2002, 18 min
- Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Ken Burns, 2004) [6]
The Departed (Martin Scorcese, 2006) [6]
- Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947) [4]
49Up (Michael Apted, 2005) [9]
Julie Murray @ FPC:
If You Stand (16mm, sound, 1997, 17 min),
I Began to Wish (16mm, silent, 2003, 5 min),
Untitled (light) (16mm, sound, 2002, 5 min),
Detroit Park (Digital video, 2005, 8 min),
Orchard (16mm, sound, 2004, 9 min),
Deliquium (16mm, sound, 2004, 15 min)
TIE Festival (notes Oct. 11-15) - link is to pdf, I saw most everything...
Jean-Pierre Gorin @FPC with Poto and Cabengo (1976?) [8]
- Enthuziam: Sinfonija Dombassa (Dziga Vertov, 1930 and re-synced Peter Kubelka, 1972) [8]
- Wonder Boys (Curtis Hanson, 1999) [6]
- The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) [7]
- Alexandra's Project (Rolf de Heer, 2004?) [6]
- The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Werner Herzog, 1974) [8]
- Bartleby (Jonathan Parker, 2005) [3]

September
-Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, 2005) [7]
Brakhage: Wonder Ring (1955), Fire of Waters (1965), First Hymn to the Night - Novalis (1994), Weir-Falcon Saga (1970), The Wold Shadow (1972), Pasht (1965), Occam's Thread (2001)
-Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) [8]
-The Last Wave (Peter Weir, 1977) [8]
-The Son (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2002) [8]
- Walkabout (Nicholas Roeg, 1971) [8]
- Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970) [6]
- Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) [8]
- The Charcoal People (Nigel Noble, 1999) [6] - written by Jose Padhilla
- The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg. 1976) [7]

August
-One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) [6]
-Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005) [7]
Drawing Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney, 2005) [8]

When keeping it simple goes wrong.

May 2005: In the greatest triumph of my paper-writing career, I chugged out a paper on Berkeley and Kant by working on it--start to finish--for nine hours in a row. It was a good paper (I earned an A and a note about the careful exegesis of Kant's first critique), and a feat of academic attention unsurpassed even by college standards (and a near-constant pacification by KUVO's May membership drive). It even beat the time I wrote two 25 pagers for Dr. Terry Schmidt in the space of 36 hours. Too bad none of that is kicking in right now. I'm writing a term paper for my Film Theory class (or, more accurately, I'm currently procrastinating on said paper by blogging), and it just works out that I have so much material that I don't quite know where or how to start this paper. AV says wisely, "Start with the first thing." But even my take on the first thing is clumsy.

In my later academic life, I'm in principle undaunted by the idea of writing 10-12 pages. It's the in practice--i.e., the actual doing of the writing--that has me stuck. Tricky how that works. I'm not sure that what I'm feeling right now qualifies as a case of writer's block. Maybe it's just writer's overwhelmence.

When it comes to writing I generally adopt the perspective that the writing "happens when it happens," and that forcing the idea to fruition just doesn't work. Additionally, I no longer pull all-nighters. Artificial deadlines and pressure I've managed to produce myself are my way of fighting the tendency to wait until the very last minute to start something, but if today's any evidence, this tactic doesn't work so well. (And the question does arise: when does "waiting the idea out" turn into avoiding work?)

One interesting challenge presented by this paper in particular, is the stretch I've made with the overall idea. I'm pretty sure that my Master's Thesis for this program will incorporate the main idea this paper will generate, and I've already thought of the potential approaches and modifications to the central idea my work in next semester's Introduction to Phenomenology class will generate. That is exciting--a multivalent analysis of a single problem or issue--and the excitement of interdisciplinary work (which I had, until very recently, forgotten). I'm so excited about the paper I've not yet written that I can't write the paper. How is that for a nerd problem?