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Can images persuade better than words? --
Nathan Ballantyne (Fordham) on the problems
with understanding what others feel and think
A philosophical framework for political hope
-- Joe Biden's inauguration speech and David
Estlund's (Brown) critiques of "utopophobia"
“Moral knowledge can be acquired in any of
the ways in which we acquire ordinary
empirical knowledge”
-- a discussion of Sarah McGrath's (Princeton)
book defending this idea
“The aim of transitional justice is to
fundamentally alter the basic terms of
interaction, both horizontally among citizens
and vertically between citizens and o!cials”
-- Colleen Murphy (Illinois) on the hard work of
following through on calls for "unity"
The professor of an online course currently
running has been dead for over a year
-- and no one bothered to inform the students
“In some standard Gettier cases, if you
reason probabilistically, it is possible to
know”
-- Alexander Pruss (Baylor) makes the case
“Philosophy can’t be so racist that one will
just be stonewalled if one draws from
traditions associated with low status
minority groups… But…”
-- Liam Ko! Bright (LSE) on why philosophers
"leave credit on the table"
Among those plagiarized were Elizabeth
Anscombe, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert
Pasnau, Tad Schmalz…
-- an update on the Roques plagiarism case
Is there a philosophy of neuroscience and if
so, what is it?
-- there will be several posts about this at the
Brains blog this week
“If I believed the election was stolen, and if I
had satis"ed myself that my belief was well
founded, then I would believe that resisting
the outcome, even with force, would be
reasonable”
-- Alec Walen (Rutgers) on the philosophical
issues involved in blaming and punishing
Trump's insurrectionists
“‘Call me a slut’ could mean ‘Remind me that
I am merely human, trapped in a body and
subject to its animal cravings.'”
-- Kim Kierkegaardashian on the ethics of dirty
tallk
Why does scienti"c fraud happen and what
can we do about it?
-- Liam Ko! Bright (LSE) looks at the problems
and a possible solution from W.E.B. Du Bois
“Saying ‘hello’ to strangers is a moral matter,
and we cannot breezily disregard the pull to
be social as mere etiquette: to ignore a
stranger would be to do something wrong”
-- so argues Kimberlee Brownlee (UBC)
Improving philosophy class with discussion
cards
-- Kaija Mortensen (Randolph College) explains
“Perpetrators of this fraud commit to
something so disturbing that it becomes
necessary to hide it even from themselves”
-- Luvell Anderson (Syracuse) on the varieties of
racial fraud
“Multiverse theorists commit the inverse
gambler’s fallacy”
-- Philip Go# (Durham) vs. the multiverse
This department of philosophy has a
“director of outreach,” and justi"ably so
-- a survey of various public philosophy outreach
initiatives at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill
A panel event to discuss the renaming of
David Hume Tower and Hume’s legacy at the
University of Edinburgh
-- taking place later this month, with Mazviita
Chirimuuta, Tommy J. Curry, and others
Over 60 philosophers, bioethicists,
psychologists, drug experts “call for the
immediate decriminalization of all so-called
recreational drugs”
-- in an article in the American Journal of
Bioethics
“One’s psychological history… is the time-
spanning rope that ties together [our]
di#erent temporal parts and makes us
complete”
-- philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg) on
when his rope was cut by amnesia
“It does not seem like a wise precedent to
prosecute your political enemies. It does not
seem like a wise precedent to leave the
criminal behavior of your political enemies
unprosecuted.”
-- "Here we have a proper antinomy" --- Just one
of the many angles by which Justin E. H. Smith
(Paris) approaches recent events.
“The monotony of complimentary reviews
steadily fed my cynicism, as it should feed
yours”
-- Paul Musgrave (Amherst) on the problems
with academic book reviews
“If we take the general status quo for
granted, and apply ethical procedures only to
narrowly de"ned questions within its limits,
we abandon the most potent power ethical
thinking can exhibit”
-- Troy Jollimore's (CSU Chico) look at the work of
an ethics consultant suggests there's room for
improvement in that business
Taking skepticism about microaggressions
seriously
-- Regina Rini (York) talks with Robert Talisse
(Vanderbilt) on the ethics of microaggressions
“Be Here Now” -- John Martin Fischer (UCR)
brings philosophy to bear on this common
spiritual injunction
The “Fake News Immunity Chatbot” employs
Socrates, Aristotle, & Gorgias to teach you to
spot fake news
-- developed by Eleni Musi (Liverpool). (Note: I
was able to use the site on my iPhone, but not in
any browser on my Windows laptop)
Developments in physics in 2020 -- a select
summary at Quanta Magazine
“It is the unconscious cognitive dissonance at
the heart of explicit racism which prevents
explicit racists from seeing the immoral
nature of their racist actions”
-- Berit Brogaard (Miami) and Dimitria Gatzia
(Akron) on racism and psychology
When it’s clear that the referee
misunderstood your paper
-- there is still something that may be learned
from the referee report, explains Lewis M.
Powell (Bu#alo)
Over 1500 political scientists call for Trump’s
immediate removal via impeachment or the
25th amendment
-- "The President’s actions show he is unwilling
or unable to ful!ll his oath to protect and defend
the Constitution"
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HOME » TEACHING »
Teaching Philosophy as a Way of
Life (guest post)
By Justin Weinberg.
December 8, 2020 at 8:41 am 10
The following is a guest post* by Stephen Angle, Steven Horst, and Tushar Irani,
philosophy professors at Wesleyan University, about their team-taught course, “Living a
Good Life” which was featured in The New York Times earlier this year, and about the idea
of teaching “philosophy as a way of life.”
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by Stephen Angle, Steven Horst, and Tushar Irani A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
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This past fall, the three of us designed and co-taught a new intro-level philosophy course A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
at Wesleyan, “Living a Good Life,” structured around the topic of philosophy as a way of
LISA on
life (PWOL). This followed initiatives that each of us had undertaken individually over the
A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
past several years in developing small PWOL !rst-year seminars that re"ected our
interests and areas of expertise. The idea of a large team-taught course arose naturally MM on
A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
from the success of those endeavors, as well as student demand for such courses. The
plan was to co-teach a course that provided a mashup of what had worked for each of ANOTHER GRAD STUDENT on
us, pooling our shared knowledge of and familiarity with Classical Eastern and Western A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
philosophy, while also o#ering students an introduction to the discipline of philosophy DAVID WALLACE on
generally. With thanks to Justin for this invitation, we thought we’d provide in this post A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
some background to our course and its design process, along with our experiences now ANONGRADSTUDENT on
the semester’s come to an end. A Publishing Guide for Graduate Students (guest …
Older »
The study of philosophy as a way of life has been a burgeoning !eld of inquiry for
scholars of ancient philosophy over the last few decades, inspired initially by the work of
Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault in the Continental tradition, and more recently in the
Anglophone world by Martha Nussbaum, Alexander Nehamas, John Sellars, and John ARCHIVES
Cooper. A range of studies have followed these works, many focused on the Western
January 2021
tradition, though the topic has also become an area of interest for scholars working on
later periods in the history of philosophy, as well as in contemporary work on non- December 2020
Western philosophy and comparative philosophy (here, here, and here). A forthcoming
November 2020
book series on the topic and several titles aimed at a general audience, including OUP’s
October 2020
current “Guides to the Good Life” series and a number of trade books, suggest the !eld is
only growing. September 2020
August 2020
PWOL-themed courses have also recently made their way into university curricula and
appear to o#er a particularly good introduction to philosophy for a diverse set of July 2020
undergraduate students. Our e#orts in creating a new high-enrollment PWOL course this June 2020
semester were greatly aided by a Mellon Initiative for E#ective Instruction run through
May 2020
the University of Notre Dame’s Philosophy as a Way of Life project, from which we
April 2020
received a grant over the summer of 2020 to construct our course from the ground up.
Notre Dame itself has provided a model of PWOL instruction with its successful “God and March 2020
the Good Life” course, featuring a comprehensive website and interactive syllabus that
February 2020
inspired us in our own course design. Given the constraints on teaching in the fall of
January 2020
2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were especially interested in creating a course
adaptable enough to accommodate in-person, hybrid, and remote learning, and to make December 2019
use of pedagogical methods and technology that would provide students with an
November 2019
accessible introduction to philosophy.
October 2019
The precise format of a PWOL course can vary and allows for considerable "exibility September 2019
depending on a department’s curricular needs and strengths, as well as an instructor’s
August 2019
own interests. At Wesleyan we have an open curriculum with the result that most of the
students in our courses are self-selecting. While our philosophy major is robust in terms July 2019
of numbers, attracting students from underrepresented groups to the major and to our June 2019
intro-level courses has been a challenge, a problem by now well known across the
May 2019
discipline.
April 2019
In our case, there were three primary goals that guided the design of our course:
March 2019
February 2019
1. To present philosophy, not only as an intellectual discipline with its own
characteristic analytic methods and questions, but as a way of seeking a better life January 2019
through philosophical cultivation.
December 2018
2. To assign—in addition to traditional academic readings, lectures, discussion, and
November 2018
assignments—immersive exercises inspired by things found in diverse classical
philosophical traditions. October 2018
3. To apply philosophical methods and the views found in various philosophical September 2018
traditions in the service of self-examination and re"ection.
August 2018
Unlike the topic-based approach of other PWOL courses, our course took a more July 2018
historically-in"ected approach by acquainting students with conceptions of the good life June 2018
developed by Confucianism, Aristotle, Daoism, and Stoicism. After an initial unit
May 2018
introducing the study of philosophy as a way of life, we divided the rest of the course into
April 2018
four core historical units that provided students with a basic conversance with each
tradition. March 2018
February 2018
Each unit of the course was organized around plenary lecture sessions and breakout
discussion sessions, but the most innovative feature involved a series of immersive January 2018
exercises that gave students experience putting philosophical approaches to living well December 2017
into practice. Some exercises involved students constructing “Desire Maps” that mapped
November 2017
means-ends relationships between their desires. In the four historical units of the course,
drawing on the success of “Stoic Week” developed by the Modern Stoicism project, we October 2017
devised and assigned for each unit a sequence of week-long “Live Like a Philosopher” September 2017
practices for students to complete on Confucianism, Aristotle, Daoism, and Stoicism. A
August 2017
consistent takeaway in teaching this course and our previous PWOL courses at Wesleyan
has been the number of students who single out these exercises as helping them form a July 2017
deeper understanding of the theories and arguments they study. June 2017
May 2017
Despite the non-ideal teaching conditions this past fall, we have found this course to be
an excellent way to provide an entry point into philosophy for students who lack April 2017
exposure to the subject. In addition to familiarizing them with the !eld of moral
March 2017
psychology, we’ve been able to discuss issues in metaphysics and epistemology, debates
February 2017
concerning the nature of free will, and topics like moral particularism, situationism, and
implicit bias. A historically-in"ected PWOL course is also highly versatile in enabling the January 2017
close study of a variety of diverse traditions and philosophical views of the good life. We
December 2016
can imagine in the future, for example, swapping out one of our core units for a unit on
November 2016
Buddhism or Existentialism.
October 2016
Our class this fall was fully enrolled with 60 students, with 50 more on the waitlist at the
September 2016
start of semester. About half the class were !rst-years who had little to no familiarity with
August 2016
philosophy as a discipline, yet we found that approaching the subject from a PWOL angle
allowed us to do many of the things we typically do in an intro-level course, such as July 2016
exercises in argument analysis, as well as try out new and less orthodox pedagogical
June 2016
techniques—in addition to the “Live Like a Philosopher” weeks, we also experimented
with having weekly student-facilitated “Dialogue Sessions,” a model again pioneered by May 2016
Notre Dame. One of the most welcome consequences of teaching this course has been April 2016
an almost exact 50/50 ratio of men and women, and a far more diverse population of
March 2016
students than we typically see in our intro-level courses. And all of this while also bringing
less-commonly-taught traditions in the history of philosophy into contact with !gures in February 2016
the Western canon. January 2016
December 2015
As we hope the links we’ve shared above show, there is clearly some robust discussion
occurring in our discipline on many aspects of PWOL research and pedagogy. Our November 2015
experience this semester emphasizes the ways in which participatory exercises can lead October 2015
simultaneously to a deeper understanding of and critical engagement with historical
September 2015
texts and to transformations of behavior and attitudes that students !nd revealing and
valuable. In fact, these twin aspects of PWOL pedagogy are mutually reinforcing. We look August 2015
forward to continuing to adapt and grow our course, and to conversations with many of July 2015
you about how to show all our students how signi!cant philosophy is for their lives.
June 2015
[art: Roy Lichtenstein, “Landscape with Philosopher” (detail)] May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
CATEGORIES TEACHING
June 2014
TAGS PHILOSOPHY PHILOSOPHY AS A WAY OF LIFE TEACHING
May 2014
April 2014
! 18 likes March 2014
Henri Perron
December 8, 2020 at 9:21 am
I hope this doesn’t come across too brutish/brazenly, but is there something
about this that is redundant, or “re-inventing the wheel”?
What I mean is, *of course* philosophy is, arguably !rst and foremost and above
all, concerned with living well or living a good life. Is that not what wide-eyed
freshmen entering their !rst philosophy class expect/hope for? Is it not what they
ought to hope for and get out of their !rst philosophy course?
Now, philosophy has been taken in a plethora of di#erent directions and intro
courses tend to re"ect that. Kudos to these professors for “reinstating” and
rea$rming this “original” (or “fundamental”– scare quotes because I’m not totally
sure these are the most correct words to use here) purpose or subject matter of
philosophy for their intro students — but there’s something alarmingly striking to
me that this is not the norm or is even somehow seen as avant-garde. On the
contrary, it seems more like some sort of purpose is being *restored* to
philosophy, and again, kudos to these professors for that.
But is this not an approach or disposition that ought to be kept in mind for many
other philosophy courses beyond 100-level?
I currently use Nicomachean Ethics as the text for my intro courses for this very
reason (among others). I use just this one text — in my course and now here, in
this post, as an example — because this text is in itself concerned centrally with
living a good life. It isn’t that part of the text is concerned with living a good life,
that a certain section is relevant to that purpose; rather, *the entire work* is
centered around what it is to live well. EN is, of course, not alone in this regard.
All of this said, I suppose my question is this: is this some sort of special,
pioneering thing being done or is it some sort of “obvious” task or mission or
obligation tied up with philosophy that has by-and-large been set aside, put on
the shelf to collect dust? Either way, again, kudos to the philosophers who put
this course together (which, from its content/readings listed above, seems to be
quite expansive and seriously dedicated to this philosophical mission of
exploring the question of living well) but is there not a more alarming question —
or dare I say, accusation — staring us contemporary philosophers and teachers
in the face that their work (and its now highly-reported and good attention
drawing status) brings to the fore? Are we as a !eld, and especially as teachers of
into to philosophy courses, failing to do something essential and proper to our
discipline and the needs of our communities?
!7
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Bharath Vallabha
December 8, 2020 at 1:28 pm
Great to see a class like this, with a focus on philosophy as a way of life and
taking a comparative approach. I would have _loved_ a class like this when I was
in college. I feel tremendous gratitude that this kind of teaching is available for
the young people now, and hope it grows. Thank you!
That said, it also seems important to be honest with the students and with
ourselves (and with the New York Times) about the ways in which philosophy
conceived this way is deeply in tension with the modern university. Not just
because of neo-liberalism or conservative attacks, though those are real. The
deeper question is: how does philosophy as a way of life relate to philosophy as a
profession? Suppose a student loves this class and studies more with these
professors, becomes a philosophy major and goes to grad school. What kind of
philosophy of life practices will then be part of their graduate training, and so
seen as part of their job expertise? I can’t see there would be any. Sure, the grad
student, like any professor, can do those practices in their life and relate it to the
practices of the historical philosophers. But, this is disjointed from their actual
training they are getting. It’s like someone going to a modern medical school can
also practice ancient, holistic conceptions of medicine that they learn on their
own or in a di#erent holistic medical school – but it seems important to tell the
patients that this combination is an “innovation” that they are doing, not
something that is just how doctors treated medicine in the past.
By necessity a course like this is an innovation, not just of how to teach
philosophy in the modern day, but of the philosophy that is being taught. A
student meditating for a week while reading the Buddha, or re"ecting on
Descartes’ meditations one per day doesn’t mean the student is doing what
those philosophers did back then. The image that we can now just continue what
they did back then – as if there is an essence of philosophy as a way of life –
seems false. The stoics, the taoists, the buddhists, etc. merged in their own ways
philosophy as therapy, as conceptual analysis, as politically engaged.
My point is the converse of Henri Perron’s above. His comment seems to be that
a course like this should be the norm since it should be obvious this is what
philosophy. Point taken. But it is not at all obvious what it is to do philosophy as a
way of life in the modern world – both in terms of the technological disruptions
we are going through, and also the globalization and merging of philosophical
traditions. A course like this strikes me like Einstein teaching relativity to
freshman. A course like this requires deeply and openly challenging the status
quo of academic philosophy, taking on the prestiguous departments in the
profession who control the jobs and who don’t think of philosophy this way at all.
In this sense, I worry deeply that the class might give students a really skewed
picture of how much work and innovation they need to do to pursue what is
being promised them. Combining this kind of innovative work with a pie in the
sky liberal arts college idealism of philosophy and the college experience can
create a laziness in the students, when the present moment requires them to
think outside the box of not just their parents but also of past and current
philosophers. Perhaps the teachers are being open about that; I hope so.
!8
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Preston Stovall
December 9, 2020 at 6:13 am
I don’t know, Bharath. I’m generally on board with your views about the need for
academic philosophy to diversify the perspectives it incentivizes, and in the
directions you indicate. But at the same time, I don’t think graduate-level study in
philosophy should be aimed at fostering the good life, or re"ection on the good
life, in the way undergraduate instruction in philosophy can at times be. Maybe if
the educational system of the university was organized di#erently from the
ground up. But philosophical inquiry today is the product of extended
conversations occurring over centuries, and for the last few centuries those
conversations have taken place inside the university system. Given the detail with
which di#erent positions have been worked out, it takes many years of focused
study on specialized topics to be able to contribute competently to these
conversations. Think about the technical skill and historical background one must
have in order to be able to publish essays defending realism for the alethic
modalities, for instance, or a non-representational account of the perception of
others’ mental states.
We could advocate for changing the conversation and prioritizing the teaching of
philosophy life practices (as you helpfully describe it) at the graduate level, but I’m
not sure that’s such a good idea. For one thing, there are profound questions
about the nature of the world and our minds wrapped up in positions on, say,
modal realism and non-representational theories of mind-reading; if
philosophers aren’t going to tackle those questions, who will? Second, there’s
already a space for contemporary philosophers to devote research into
questions of the good life, and no shortage of essays and books on the subject.
Third, I don’t think it’s the place of graduate education to foster life practices, or
re"ection on life practices, in graduate students. There’s a place for that sort of
thing at the undergraduate education, to a certain extent, but I don’t see it at the
graduate level. Relatedly, I’m not very keen on the thought of professors in
philosophy developing the kind of mentoring relationships necessary for
graduate study, but where those relationships are focused on examining life
practices. Bluntly, I wouldn’t want to pattern my life after some of the habits I’ve
seen among some of the philosophers I know. Academic philosophers are, on
the whole, a curious lot, and I don’t think we’re the model for mentoring in that
kind of mode.
These last two concerns are correlated with the current state of the university
system, and for that reason they would perhaps not be a problem if the system
were reorganized. But insofar as there’s already a place for those philosophers
so inclined to devote themselves to these sorts of questions, and there’s plenty
of other important work to do in philosophy today, I don’t think the absence of an
institution-wide devotion to investigating the good life is a concern.
But I agree that a course like the one in the OP is valuable in part because of the
contemporary situation, and especially our need to teach people how to re"ect
on and critically relate themselves to the technological &etc. disruptions we’re
facing today. Kudos to Angle, Horst, and Irani for this project, and thanks for
sharing. It looks fascinating, and I plan to adapt parts of into my teaching. I’m
particularly curious to see how the immersive exercises work, and what kind of
framing was used to help students put themselves into the positions of
philosophers with di#erent points of view.
!8
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Stephen Angle
December 9, 2020 at 8:51 am
Thanks to Henri, Bharath, and Preston for these re"ections! I would agree that it
is tricky to think about the role the PWOL should play in graduate education, but
my colleagues and I agree that it is apt to tie discussions of PWOL to questions
about the nature of the discipline and the modern university. Early in the course
we assigned a couple chapters from Socrates Tenured in order to discuss exactly
this, discussing with our students the way that Frodeman and Briggle’s notion of
“meso-level philosophy” connects to the practical roles as socio-politically
engaged individuals that Confucian philosophers, for example, might seem to
exemplify.
A few summers ago I co-ran an NEH Institute called “Reviving Philosophy as a
Way of Life.” One of the striking things about the experience was the degree to
which the participants felt that they were returning — for many, after a long
absence — to what had gotten them interested in philosophy at the beginning.
I’m not denying that there are important goods that come from rigorous,
“disciplined” inquiry of the kind that dominates the profession now. (For what it’s
worth, Frodeman and Briggle don’t beny this, either.) But the emphasis of our
research, teaching, and lives as philosophers tilts very strongly in the direction of
such inquiry — for all sorts of familiar reasons — and perhaps we should strive
to adjust that balance.
We’d be happy to follow up with anyone who has questions, comments, or
suggestions about the immersive exercises — complete details of what we did
are on the course website!
!4
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Bharath Vallabha
December 9, 2020 at 9:03 am
Preston, What you are suggesting seems to separate undergraduate teaching
from graduate training in a radical way (btw, posting this as a separate comment
as the reply button wasn’t working.) Yes, discussions of modal realism or theories
of perception involve a great deal of specialization (I tend to oscillate on how
worthwhile they are; but agree people need freedom to pursue what they want).
Also yes, need to be wary of taking professors in grad school as gurus. But, this
course is integrating _the practices of philosophies_ of stoicism, taoism, etc into
the class: not just talking about them, but giving the students practice of what it is
to integrate them into one’s life. This kind of practice too is very specialized and
takes a great deal of work – no less than what goes into discussions of modal
realism. This is di#erent from writing books on ethics or the good life – akin to
the di#erence between writing manuals for being an athlete and actually being
an athlete.
Not trying to downplay your point. In fact, I think your point is exactly what
proponents of this kind of class need to confront more openly – in the profession
and with their students. The dichotomy here between undergrad teaching and
grad education is real – like that between teaching phil in a liberal arts college like
Wesleyan and teaching at NYU. This shows that there is no such thing as “the
academic way of doing philosophy”, but even in the last 100 years there has been
a schism in academic philosophy – between the prestiguous departments which
place grad students (and where Quine or Sellars rather than Seneca or Emerson
get taught) and the majority of smaller depts teaching philosophy, where
students seek a more “ancient” conception of philosophy as self-transformation.
The question of what to do with this dichotomy applies as much to the
professors of this course, as to a professor teaching modal realism at Princeton.
What is amazing is _how little_ this problem is discussed. I think it’s because the
research depts and the teaching depts have an implicit agreement. By blurring
the boundary, the research depts get to keep the social prestige of philosophy as
wisdom (when their “research” has nothing to with wisdom) , and the same
blurring keeps the teaching depts to have the prestige of being connected to the
latest research. But the burden of this double illusion falls on the students who
presume that there is a natural link between undergrad education and grad
education – I was someone who mistakenly assumed that, and it took me years
of confusion to work myself out of it. And no professor at the research depts I
got my BA and PhD at, nor my colleagues when I taught at a liberal arts college,
helped me !gure it out – they were all too invested in fostering the illusion. So
while I admire this course, it’s not enough unless it also helps the students tackle
the reality of philosophy education in the modern world and its tensions.
!2
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Preston Stovall
December 9, 2020 at 4:15 pm
Hi Bharath. I suppose I don’t see that it’s so radical to distinguish undergraduate
exposure to the good life through study of Stoicism and Confucianism, say, and
the graduate study of modal realism or non-representational theories of mind-
reading. They’re devoted to di#erent aspects of the perennial questions we face,
just as an introductory astronomy course is devoted to explaining large-scale
features of the universe that courses in quantum mechanics and general
relativity make no mention of.
At any rate, I can’t speak for other people but in my own experience with places
like those at which Quine and Sellars taught, there’s a fair amount of re"ection on
the good life already at work. So I’m not convinced the dichotomy you talk about
actually exists. And because I don’t want to turn this into a defense of one
doctrine or another, I won’t mention Michael Thompson’s stu# on life and action
as Aristotelian categories of cognition conditioning the possibility of knowing
persons and organisms, Brandom’s work on Hegel’s understanding of modernity
as a process we’re still working our way through, or the self-re"ective agency
animating Engstrom’s study of Kant. But I will say you become a better person
just walking around after John McDowell and watching that man live his life.
Either way, I don’t think it’s controversial that an institution producing work like
Baier’s “Doing Things with Others: The Mental Commons”, Korsgaard’s “Self-
Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant”, or Sellars’ “Reason and the Art of
Living in Plato” is contributing to the study of the good life in a profound way.
Could philosophers be doing more of that? Sure. But there are opportunity costs
for everything, and the work being done is, on the whole, substantial in
addressing those perennial questions. So I do not share the assessment that
academic philosophers are laboring under a “double illusion” whereby teaching
schools and research schools place a “burden” on students. I think we should be
unquali!edly pleased at and interested in the fact that courses like this are being
taught to undergraduates today. I hope they catch on.
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Bharath Vallabha
December 10, 2020 at 10:01 am
Preston, I greatly admire the work of Korsgaard, McDowell, Thompson and others
(though their silence about basic issues in the profession – like a global
perspective in philosophy and the jobs situation – seems to me a big mistake and
speaks against their wisdom). But if an undergrad takes a course like in the post
here (where they treat the philosophical exercises that stoics did, for example, as
philosophy) and want to do that kind of philosophy at a deeper level, getting a
PhD with Korsgaard or McDowell is just not the way to do it. Seems you agree as
much when you say philosophy as way of life (PWOL) is good for the undergrad
level. But the thing is, there are places where they do pursue PWOL at a deeper
level – it’s just not in academia mostly. For example, with settings with teachers
like the Dalai Lama or Thomas Merton – or in less religious settings, in a
meditation class or a retreat with spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle. To modify
your analogy of astronomy, a PWOL intro class like this has ties to advanced
courses in both the physics department and the philosophy department, but
where the physics and philosophy professors pretend like the other dept doesn’t
exist. This is a deep institutional question raised by a course like this: what is
being taught in the course is pursued further in churches or in new age
communities as much as it is pursued in phil grad departments, and in many
ways grad school is a detriment insofar as the professors there like McDowell
aren’t teaching any philosophical exercises other than thinking broadly
construed.
The tension here is not new. In the west, it goes back at least to the di#erences
between Plato and the skeptics in how they found Socrates inspiring. Socrates’
philosophy lends itself as much to an academic life as it does to non-academic
life – and so there is no one way of exemplifying philosophy. More recently, with
the rise of the modern university, this was the tension between Kant/Hegel and
Kierkegaard/Schopenhaur (the tension is right there in the name of the
philosophy building at Harvard – named after Emerson but, try as Cavell did, isn’t
taught there). I think the assumption that PWOL is good for the undergrads but
not for grad school covers over this deep tension – who does it, where, with what
quali!cations (if any), with what audience are all open questions, and not settled
by contingencies of university administration.
My sense is the public is hungry for PWOL, but academic philosophy broadly is
not situated to provide it (it is too focused on providing other important things
like McDowell’s “Mind and World”). We merely have to look at the socio-political
situation of the humanities to see how much a text like this isn’t speaking to the
public – they are esoteric texts, even if it doesn’t feel that way in grad school or at
a phil conference. A course like this is trying to change this. Saying it is good for
the undergrads undervalues the depth of the change it represents to the
profession. If the profession survives in academia, it will be through courses like
this. But I suspect it still won’t be enough. Students inspired by a course like this
might !nd new ways to do PWOL with the broader society outside academia –
that might be the great contribution of this kind of course.
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Preston Stovall
December 10, 2020 at 4:22 pm
Hi Bharath. I suspect we’re not so far apart. In my remark yesterday, I almost
referenced modes of pedagogy associated with the Dalai Lama. I participated
(minimally) in a crash-course in philosophy of science at a Tibetan Buddhist
monastery in India last summer, set up by the Dalai Lama with Emory University
in the 90s. But that’s a special kind of instruction, and if you enter higher
education with a Laman (?) attitude in almost any other context today you’re
bound to be frustrated. And for good reason, I think. But we’re way o# the topic
of the OP, so I’ll leave it at that.
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Bharath Vallabha
December 10, 2020 at 5:11 pm
Hi Preston, That’s very interesting about your course at the Tibetan Buddhist
monastery. Not sure why you say that is a “special kind of instruction” and that
this is way o# the topic of the OP. It seems very much the issue at hand. There is
a clear connection between the kind of practices the course in the OP is
teaching, and at least some of the practices one learns at a Buddhist monastery.
A student in this intro class might very well explore “further studies” not only at a
 philosophy PhD program but also at, say, a Buddhist monastery, and the
millennia of intellectual and consciousness-changing traditions that is a part of.
Which raises the question: what is the relation between a Buddhist (or Christian,
etc) monastery further studies and the further studies one gains at a university
PhD program? Yes, if one tries to bring the two together as institutions are now,
one is bound to be frustrated. How to respond to that frustration is I think the
broader issue raised by this kind of course.

The modern university philosophy department is a particular construction of the

last 250 years – and came about in a time of (a) the industrial revolution and (b)
western dominance. Now both of those are ending or changing radically, and so
the “package” of a university education as it was even, say, 50 years ago, is now
being dispersed in all sorts of ways. This means a lot of the boundaries and
conceptualizations that went with philosophy in the academia of the last two
centuries can now also be questioned and reevaluted. That is a great thing. My
sense is people need to buckle up, it’s going to get bumpy for everyone –
academics and non-academics alike. From that turmoil new conceptions of
philosophy and ways of organizing our society can emerge.

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LESLIE GLAZER
December 10, 2020 at 10:19 pm
I !nd all the comments interesting and thought provoking. I am left wondering
whether it would be clarifying to consider two themes: First, whether the
question about undergraduate vs graduate education, and that between
selective philosophy graduate schools vs liberal arts schools, could both be
reframed in terms of the history of the meaning of philosophy within the history
of philosophy? Philosophy as a way of life with purposes connected with living
well, being happy, and realizing wisdom, vs. philosophy as a speci!c discipline
with speci!c methods and contents and concerns. These aspects historically
were for the most part aligned but seem to have increasingly split with the trends
in the west that solidi!ed universities as academic [and lately professional]
institutions, and decentered philosophies connection with christianity on the one
hand and psychology on the other. Marxism and existentialism [just think
kierkegaard here] were the !rst challenge to this split. Second, consider the void
left in the west when in addition, rightly or wrongly, people aren’t !nding
satisfactory ways of living in spite of increase freedom to choose their lives, and
rightly or wrongly the orientations and touchstones of conventions and
traditional christian and judaic frameworks no longer give their lives purpose or a
path to meaning or salvation? This is the space that we see popular psychology
and psychoanalysis try to !ll, leading recently to all those courses on the
‘psychology of happiness’, and also the space where individuals have drifted
towards yoga and buddhism as practices, and even not surprisingly,
philosophical ways of living. Philosophy can !ll a signi!cant role here, but cannot
unless it can connect to the individual directly. Philosophical counseling has tried
this, but tends to be only half serious, or a consultation rather than a way of life.
‘Philosophy as a way of life’ might be a path here but it is unclear how it would
relate to ‘philosophy as an academic profession’. I don’t think such an approach is
by de!nition always introductory or cannot be as advanced as any philosophy
graduate program. Just consider that Plato thought such a life would include
study of metaphysics and epistemology. In tibetan buddhism, there is advanced
philosophical study, but in a context of ethical and meditative practice to make it
real and to deepen ones understanding. I am not sure what is possible for us in
our secular world where all traditions have been decentered

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Paul Taborsky
December 13, 2020 at 1:01 pm
The course sounds interesting as way of re"ection on certain kinds of perennial
philosophical issues, but the idea of philosophy as a way of life or or as a guide to
a way of life runs into serious di$culties, to my mind.

The only ‘way of life’ directly relevant to modern philosophy is the academic way
of life, or, more broadly, that of teaching, research, writing, and re"ection,
whether done within the academy or without. That is the way of life that modern
academic philosophy trains one for, because that is what one does, as a
philosophy student, and that is what the modern university makes possible. Ways
of life, after all, do not exist on their own. There would be no point in training to
become a Buddhist monk, for example, if there were no Buddhist sangha, etc.

Furthermore, philosophy is no longer needed as a justi!cation for the legitimacy

of secular re"ection, as it might have been for those raised in an era when
religious institutions had a stronger grip on intellectual life, which might have
been the case for Hadot, who, let us not forget, left the priesthood over a con"ict
with its views on modernity.

Thus, what’s the point of teaching about a way of life if it is not to be used as
intellectual justi!cation for a way of life that already exists, or is not provided for
by the institutions doing the teaching? If the !rst is no longer necessary, and the
second is to go beyond what is already the case, the only way to make
philosophy relevant to the ‘good life’ again would be to bring back to philosophy
those sorts of social structures that made such ways of achieving the good life
possible to begin with, i.e. the church, the monastery, the temple, or the
philosophical sect. One’s teachers would become gurus, and philosophy classes
would become akin to therapy sessions, or more likely, since it is always the
institution that is more important, training sessions with the goal of inducing one
to becoming a member of the group or institution concerned.

That, after all, is what being a Confucian, a Mohist, a Stoic or a Jansenist meant
being, in the past. Some might welcome the return of such ways of life to
philosophy, but others might be wary of the inevitable trade-o#s that such
changes might entail.

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Tushar Irani
December 15, 2020 at 1:15 pm
Chiming in with Steve to say thanks for these comments! To Henri’s !rst question:
one of the things that’s become apparent in the back-and-forth in this thread is
that there isn’t in fact much agreement on what “the wheel” is when it comes to
philosophy. But it would be a mistake in any event to think of our course as
attempting a reinvention of the discipline. We tried to be clear about what we
hoped this course would provide students by compiling a list of goals during the
design stages over the summer with the help of our friends at Notre Dame. You
can !nd that list under “Course Vision” on the website.

It’s also worth emphasizing the population of students a course such as this one
is designed to serve. The vast majority of undergrads who take an intro-level
philosophy course have little to no interest in what happens in academic
philosophy, and many come into our classes feeling no great need to understand
or examine too deeply the topics, texts, and debates that enliven us in our
research — certainly not to the degree necessary to sustain them through
graduate study. And that’s just !ne. Still, we think the study of philosophy and the
methods of inquiry, argumentation, and analysis that are the tools of our trade
can help students develop a better grip on the questions that do occupy them.
As we say in the OP, structuring a course around the topic of the good life
provides an e#ective point of entry for such study, engaging a variety of students
we don’t generally attract to our intro-level courses.

So the main aim here in presenting philosophy from a PWOL angle is a purely
protreptic one, which requires meeting students where they already are. In terms
of Leslie’s helpful framing of things above — “philosophy as a way of life with
purposes connected with living well, being happy, and realizing wisdom vs.
philosophy as a speci!c discipline with speci!c methods and contents and
concerns” — I see the former as a means of getting students into the latter.
Some of our students may go on to major in philosophy and a smaller subset
may consider pursuing graduate study in the subject, at which point a talk about
philosophy in its professionalized form would be worth having. It may well be that
people attracted to philosophy primarily as a guide to the good life are best
served, for the reasons Bharath and Paul suggest, looking to institutions and
communities other than the modern academy to pursue that interest further,
and hopefully a course like this one can give students a few tools and conceptual
resources to do this in a novel way.

All the same, I don’t see teaching philosophy in a PWOL mode working at cross
purposes with doing philosophy in a more disciplinary mode. Regarding the
immersive exercises: it’s best to regard them as having a pedagogical function in
o#ering students another evaluative lens through which to consider the views
and arguments they encounter in classic texts. In my experience this has always
led to a better understanding of the views themselves, similar to how a lab
augments a student’s understanding of a theory in organic chemistry. It’s an
added bene!t when students !nd the philosophical ideas they’re exploring have
an impact on their sense of what it means to live well. Many of them do !nd this,
which is great and (especially during a year like this last one) we welcome it. But
it’s also equally !ne given the nature of philosophy as a no-holds-barred mode of
inquiry for students to consider and reject all the approaches to the good life
they study in a course such as ours, including the idea of PWOL itself. Either way,
they’d be doing philosophy.

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Stephen R. Grimm
December 15, 2020 at 3:52 pm
Excellent and really thoughtful post, Tushar. Thanks for that. And
congrats to you and the Steves on such an exciting course! It’s
fascinating all around.

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Preston
December 16, 2020 at 8:17 am
I !nally had time to look over the course in detail. It’s very well-structured, and
online resources are put to good use (the “Cancel Ancient Philosophy?” midterm
debate looks like it was a blast). I have a couple of questions about how the
course is run. Most of my teaching now is entirely online, so that’s the angle I’m
approaching this from.

First, I see that you’re using Perusall for the readings. Perusall bills itself, among
other things, as a way of engaging with students by encouraging them to
annotate texts so that instructors can respond to their questions. Did the
students tend to do that? And did you !nd there was much peer-to-peer
interaction there?

Second, it seems like you were able to have students interact online with Zoom,
and that you had regular breakout sessions. Other than Persuall, I didn’t see any
text-based or discussion board interactive work. If they were employed and I
missed them, did you !nd they were successful, or favorably comparable to the
Zoom meetings?

I love the immersive exercises, and I’d like to port something similar into some of
my courses. One of the universities I teach for has 8-week terms, however, and
many of the students are active-duty military. For this reason, I worry that the
once-per-day schedule for the immersive exercises would be too much to ask.
Did you !nd that the completion rate for the daily journal entries was close to
total? Any thoughts about how this part of the course worked?

Finally, any general thoughts about things you’ll do di#erently the next time you
teach the course? And thank you for making this material available and open for
discussion!

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Stephen Angle
December 17, 2020 at 1:55 pm
A few responses to Preston’s speci!c questions. Student engagement with one
another via Perusall was quite robust — lots of threads,not just one-o# remarks.
It’s a really fascinating platform more generally, providing visibility to how
students are thinking about the texts in a fashion that I have never experienced
as clearly. And it’s designed to be scaleable — it can be used with pretty much
any number of students.

We went back and forth on whether to have an asynchronous discussion board.

All three of us have used them in past classes, with varying results, often
depending on how tightly they are integrated to the rest of the class. In this case,
we decided that (1) there were enough moving parts already, and (2) we thought
the students would have a decent about of live/synchronous possibilities for
discussion — especially because of the weekly dialog sessions — so we decided
against a discussion board. In a slightly di#erent set-up, it might be a good idea.
(Keep in mind that more than 3/4 of our students were on campus and most of
them attending in-person.)

I think that the immersive exercises are pretty "exible. In a few cases we gave
students more than one day to work on a given exercises, and that idea could be
adapted to providing more time for students in non-traditional learning
environments. The signi!cant majority of our students turned in virtually all of the
journal entries on time, though there was some "akiness here and there, and
some issues inevitably arose. For all but one or two students, they were able to
keep up enough with the pace of the exercises. We don’t yet have access to our
teaching evaluations, but based on other kinds of feedback and our observation,
I think we all think that the exercises (including the journaling) were at the center
of what made the class work.

We haven’t quite had time yet to have a real post-mortem conversation, but right
now I don’t think there are any big things that we’ll change next time around.
Thanks for the questions and comments!

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Preston Stovall
December 18, 2020 at 10:15 am
Thank you for the follow up, Stephen. In addition to the immersive exercises, it
sounds like Perusall is worth giving a run in some of the courses I teach.

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