Teaching Statement


My first course in philosophy was taught by a professor with an extraordinary skill - he could lecture the entire period without once tripping over a word or re-starting a sentence that was going somewhere he didn't want it to. I marveled at his eloquence as he told us about the ancients, the medievals, the early moderns, the late moderns, the postmoderns. Not once, all year, did he fumble or reframe a thought.

At the time I couldn't distinguish this skill, which is rare and has its purposes, from skill at teaching. But to teach philosophy is to teach both content and method, for philosophy is distinguished both by the kinds of questions it asks and by its methodology, by the way philosophers think about and approach these questions. Furthermore, it is very hard to teach the content of philosophy without teaching its methods, for the content doesn't come alive until you struggle with it yourself. In this sense, philosophy is both a theoretical and practical discipline.

This understanding of philosophy guides my teaching in that I focus as a teacher on helping students acquire intellectual and philosophical virtues. This is done in the context of learning the content of philosophy, and students are evaluated in part by how securely they grasp this content. But the focus is on a manner of thinking that will be of enormous value to students whether they continue in philosophy or not. Two anecdotes will perhaps convey what I mean. Jaegwon Kim, in response to a question about who his formative influence had been, mentioned the great philosopher of science Carl Hempel. Why did Hempel stand out? Because Kim learned from him a way of thinking about and pursuing philosophy. As Kim put it: "I hope I learned from him a certain style of philosophy, one that emphasizes clarity, responsible argument, and aversion to studied obscurities and feigned profundities." Similarly, Dean Zimmerman said of his teacher Roderick Chisholm: "He combined confidence in his own abilities with the desire to get it right and extreme openness to the help and criticisms of others - a kind of humility before the truth, a willingness to yield to the truth, at the expense of one's pet theory, and to be grateful to critics for showing its inadequacies. A lot of his students have been inspired by that combination of attitudes, and have hoped to achieve some pale imitation of it, anyhow, in their own intellectual lives." In both cases what matters, what students remember and value, is a way of thinking and being.