Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Teaching

  • “Good Practices”

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ I am mostly out of the philosophy profession and have been for several years now, so but for Justin Weinberg and his Daily Nous, I would be unaware of the vital goings-on of professional philosophy’s Bright Young Things and their fellow travelers. I would have never have known, for example,…

  • Toleration

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Suppose that you live next door to someone and think something about the way they live – their religion, their domestic arrangements, their politics, even their race – is wrong or objectionable. If you are a particularly grousy or dogmatic neighbor, you might take every occasion to let them know how…

  • The Interdependence of Activists and Skeptics

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ It started as a casual conversation between myself and a colleague, but quickly went in a heated and interesting direction. She and I were talking about our teaching, and I mentioned some class readings and discussions my sections were doing on a particular issue that my colleague and I both care…

  • Texts [That] Don’t Care

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ I am preparing for a course I teach and that means deciding between a number of books that I could assign. As always, the experience reminds me how much I prefer assigning texts whose meaning is either opaque or whose arguments are incomplete or even objectionable. Since I teach future teachers,…

  • a discussion with susan blum on ungrading

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ In this conversation, I talk with higher education anthropologist Susan Blum (Notre Dame) about her work on how students experience higher education. We also talk about an essay collection she recently edited called Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What To Do Instead (West Virginia University Press: 2020). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff_mp1YbvnQ&t=3151s&ab_channel=ElectricAgora 0:58​…

  • The Philosophy Rapture

    by Robert Gressis _____ Assume there are about 20,000 professional philosophers in the USA. Imagine that the bottom 19,000 of them were raptured, leaving only the top 1,000 philosophers.[1] What would happen to philosophy? I don’t believe much of anything would happen to philosophy. Indeed, I bet that if you looked just at the top…

  • Philosophy, Teaching and the “White Paper” on Publishing Ethics

    by Daniel A. Kaufman My dialogue with Robert Gressis, on his essay, “Is Philosophy OK?” and on the recent “white paper” on publication ethics.  First aired on Sophia, MeaningofLife.TV, May 30 2019.

  • Is Philosophy OK?

    by Robert Gressis Lately, I’ve been wondering whether it’s OK for me to be a philosophy professor. You might wonder, “Why on earth should anyone wonder whether it’s OK to be a philosophy professor?” I have a simple argument. It goes like this: The Conceptual Claim: Professors do three things as part of their jobs:…