The Spectacle(s) of Philosophy

A couple years ago, I was at a general education conference, sitting on a panel with faculty in

various disciplines from several Utah institutions of higher education, discussing whether and

how we should think differently about designing the introductory courses that introduce our

majors, on the one hand, and the introductory courses that serve as general education and, thus,

as the only courses students will take in our fields, on the other.

This isn’t something I thought about until a few years ago. My standard operating

procedure kept me focused on my own classes, my own department, my own field. Moreover, as

a junior faculty member, there wasn’t a whole lot of time to consider the broader, institutional

perspective. But once I received tenure and then became faculty senate president, I started

gaining a more holistic point of view. I found myself working on our General Education Program

committee, charged with developing a model of general education that went beyond disparate

“menu” items and offered, instead, an integrative program.

At the community college, general education is what we do. Though we are trained to

teach in a discipline, that training doesn’t fit the institutional context in which we teach.

Community colleges have what might be called “premajors” that prepare students to transfer to

four-year colleges, but it’s only rarely that I ever see a student sign up for a second course in

philosophy. I get students for sixteen weeks, and then I don’t see them again. Given this, I

gradually started to allow myself to interrogate and reimagine the traditional introductory course

in philosophy. I stopped asking, “What skills and content should one teach in a typical intro

class?” And I started asking, “What are the most important philosophical ideas and skills that I
could teach in sixteen weeks for students who, in all likelihood, will never take a second course

in philosophy?”7

Because I was working on these questions, I was invited to participate in that panel on the

pitfalls and promises of approaching general education courses differently than introducing-the-

major courses. I focused my comments on assignment redesign—how to encourage students to

draw creative connections between philosophy and their talents, interests, and other areas of

study: art, video, poetry, graphic design, or whatnot. Because of a last-minute change, one of the

other panel members was also a philosophy professor, from a research institution, and we ended

up having a bit of a back-and-forth for a while. He was worried about the “watering down” of

expectations in intro courses for nonmajors. He said that he was always careful to treat

nonmajors with the same expectations as majors and that it was a disservice to conclude that

nonmajors can’t handle the rigor of a typical philosophy course.

But I pushed back on the idea that teaching differently means “watering down.” I did so

by arguing that the conceptual tools we bring to an object of inquiry become the lens through

which we see that object. I used an example from an essay by Byron Good called “How

Medicine Constructs Its Objects.”8 In it, Good traces a familiar Foucauldian line. When medical

students learn to take patient histories, they are inadvertently acquiring the lens through which

7 See Jane Drexler, “Philosophy for General Education: Teaching Environmental Ethics to Non-

Majors,” Teaching Philosophy 38, no. 2 (2015):289–305.

8 Byron J. Good, “How Medicine Constructs Its Objects,” in Medicine, Rationality and

Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),

65–87.
they conceive the patient: As they fill out those history charts more and more, they begin to walk

into the patients’ rooms with those categories and questions emblazoned on their minds. And

while, of course, those lenses are crucial to the patient’s diagnosis and treatment, they also limit

what the medical practitioner is able to see about the patient. The patient becomes an object that

is viewable only through those categories and questions.

Similarly, our discipline’s focus on a particular kind of assignment—the critical analysis

paper—becomes a lens that limits how we experience philosophical texts. Though such papers

can develop students’ skills in using evidence, critiquing an argument, and identifying

presuppositions, they also limit the questions you can ask and the understanding you can glean.

You might miss the moments of wonder, inspiration, connection, and resonance—the moments

in which an idea enters our world and in which our world fits into an idea. In short, it’s the

critical analysis paper that “waters down” philosophy.

In my courses, we still write a few traditional papers—I teach critical analysis and

argument development. But I also assign more creative work: my students have submitted comic

strips and advertisements on key philosophical concepts; they’ve written songs about the

Allegory of the Cave and Descartes’ Meditations; they’ve created videos on logical fallacies. If

we are willing to unshackle our course assignments (and content) from the tradition of the

discipline just a little bit, we might be able to grind a few new philosophical lenses, recapturing

the fullness of philosophical inquiry and engagement and cultivating an appreciation for the

multiplicity of ways we can say, “This is philosophy.”