Ok, before you humanities majors start sharpening your pitchforks, just hear me out for a second. Philosophy is an amazing subject that is absolutely worth learning more about. Much like science, it provides a framework in which to view the world. Philosophy classes though are a complete joke. The subject is taught using the worst possible methods. For the purposes of this article, when I refer to Philosophy class, I’ll be referring to the typical Introduction to Philosophy classes that nearly all college freshmen are subjected to, regardless of major. “Well actually Dan, my 500-level Exploration of Kierkegaard’s Junction Theory Seminar was really informative”, while I’m glad you enjoyed that, my hypothetical naysayer, most students never make it that far, so I’ll be focusing on what is turning people off to this interesting realm. Look, I’m being an education pundit!
Philosophy is often taught the same way as we would teach history. This is understandable to a certain extent, having some historical context to the events of Socrates’ life and the circumstance of his death is necessary as to understanding his views. However, far too much emphasis is placed on learning names and dates in a rote-memorization format. Philosophy is so much more than just reciting in 1500 BC, Philosopher A said XYZ about insert-topic-here for an exam. This teaching method works fine for going over the basics of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but much less so for philosophy.
Speaking of history, most philosophy courses only focus on philosophers that died thousands of years ago. Don’t get me wrong, understanding the works of the OG’s such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Siddhartha, etc is important, but often the closest to modern day most entry-level philosophy courses get is Immanuel Kant (he died in 1804). The implication of this is subtle but clear; philosophy is ancient history and isn’t relevant. There are no new philosophers, nobody today has anything new to add. That’s a horrible message to spread, not to mention untrue and insulting. Are we really going to pretend that Nelson Mandela and Hideo Kojima have added nothing to mankind? Society is built by layering wisdom on top of the work of those who came before. This is why legal precedent is so important. However, most Intro to Philosophy courses start at ancient Greece, skip to medieval Europe, and skip ahead to the final stop of Immanuel Kant.
While most philosophy courses do go over foundational concepts such as Plato’s allegory of the cave or his concept of the philosopher kings, this is often done in a vacuum. By that, I mean that these concepts are taught in relation to The Republic and only in relation to that one book. No other greater context is applied to it, thus causing students to just cram-vomit-forget the material by semesters end. For example, very few professors bother to make the connection between Plato’s philosopher kings to the Supreme Court justices, as the justices serve a similar role as to what Plato envisioned. The material absolutely needs to be connected to something relevant, or else it won’t stick. Truthfully, I’m not stating any novel concepts here.
Philosophy courses also have another issue; while it’s good that they use original source material (such as Plato’s Republic), their reliance on it as a sole source is concerning. These texts were written thousands of years ago and indeed require a high-bar of reading comprehension and dense thought to truly grasp. These works are legitimately difficult reads, and most students are not going to get a whole lot out of them without external guidance. To exclusively rely on these to teach beginners is akin to asking ESL students to read Shakespeare or asking the obese students in gym class to start dunking basketballs (and by using those examples, I look forward to the ad-hominem comments of You’re a fat-phobic xenophobe!). These are texts that need to be worked up to, and shouldn’t be Day One material.
“Well Dan, you’ve torn down Philosophy classes, but do you have any solutions?” I’m glad you asked, anonymous naysayer! First instead of the regurgitation-heavy history, aspect, more focus can be logical fallacies. A few excellent primers to this are A Field Guide to Lies by Daniel Levitin, Red Teaming by Bryce Hoffman, and Loserthink by Scott Adams. Once a professor has covered all of the basics of logical fallacies, students can be drilled to spot them in each other’s arguments in an in-class debate contest. Further, the students can then be instructed to watch a political speech or a CEO’s press conference and then challenge them to find fallacies. A forward-thinking social studies teacher-turned-YouTuber has done a masterful job at this.
Instead of using something like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius as the core text and using modern/more layman sources to support it, we can simply just flip that. We simply start with more approachable sources such as Ryan Holiday’s books on stoicism and then work up to Meditations. Ryan Holiday is a modern author who does a great job at explaining stoicism, and therefore has a better chance at hooking a beginner than the source material would. His podcast is also absolutely worth a listen to as well, though that’s a separate topic.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, including more modern-day works would be a welcome addition to the syllabus as well. Nobody sitting in a freshman philosophy course was alive during the same time as Immanuel Kant, though Nelson Mandela passed away not too long ago and his words would have a hell of a lot more pull than Nero’s otherwise would, with all things being equal. Making philosophy relevant to the modern world might actually entice students to sign up for another, more in-depth philosophy course. Doubly so since current state is a bunch of college freshmen who wind up hating philosophy at the end of the semester, and they never touch the topic again.
I genuinely want more people to have an interest in philosophy. Being able to understand and pick out logical fallacies in real-time essentially sharpens your built-in Bullshit Detector, and once that’s up-and-running, people might start to think you can see the future. Having an understanding of Immanuel Kant’s views of universal ethics would go a long way in seeing what is truly just and unjust, rather than our current status quo of just yelling our knee-jerk reactions into a void. If my improvement ideas were universally applied to every Intro to Philosophy course in America, we’d gradually break the stigmas surrounding the subject (such as philosophers are smug and think they’re better than all of us, philosophy only exists to help people sound smug at parties, philosophy being a bullshit class my counselor is making me take, and I’ll never use any of this after I graduate!).
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