Teaching philosophy, what to do?
So here I am, the last teaching done, and an office to clear out, and books to dispose of. What do I keep?
By one of those odd coincidences, I was thumbing through Richard Gale's The Language of Time wondering whether I'd ever want to look at it again, just as a tweet appeared onscreen announcing Craig Callender's brand new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time.
Gale's title pretty much gives away its date. Few now would baptise like that a book substantially about metaphysical questions. But back in 1968 this excellent book was the best available. Terrific stuff. Read it, and maybe a dozen significant articles or chunks from McTaggart, Broad, and others (collected in one or two handy readers of the time), and you were up to speed on the state of the art in perhaps a couple of weeks work at the outside.
Callender's handbook weighs in at almost three times the number of pages, and much more than that in terms of numbers of words. And — if it is anything like the other excellent Oxford Handbooks — the many articles will only aim to give a glimmer of where we've got to in the philosophy of time, and will each have daunting bibliographies of must-read papers, and books. How long now to get up to speed, to the point of being able to launch out on research even in one corner of the philosophy of time? Six months?
We could of course multiply such examples across philosophy. A case I've mentioned before here, the theory of descriptions. What was there to read in 1968? Remember, Donnellan's paper had just been published. A student could still pretty easily read everything worth reading in two or three days. And now?
The explosion of publications in philosophy over my time — good publications, pieces you'd want to take note of — has been staggering. It has changed what it is like to work in philosophy in all kinds of ways, changed therefore what it is like to be a "professional" philosopher, to the point where the demands of the discipline are increasingly at odds with that yearning to make connections and see big patterns that gets many of us into philosophy in the first place (remembering again Sellars: "The aim of philosophy," he wrote, "is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term"). But I wonder how much of this great change we have really come to terms with.
More specifically, how much has all this been taken aboard in our teaching practices? Of course, over the years, we (meaning, at least, we in the UK) have had to do some hard thinking about teaching, but it has driven by how to cope with a great worsening of staff-student ratios (at least in most places), how to jump through the hoops of "quality" assessments, how to cope with a broader ability band.
Oddly, though, philosophers don't seem to have done much thinking about how to cope with the changing nature of the discipline itself. How should our teaching respond? We carry on much as before, don't we? No doubt our lectures have nicer overheads — where were they in 1968? — and we give better handouts, and so on and so forth. But have we been thinking about how best to structure or teaching, given the changes in the very practice of philosophy itself? I suspect not. Or have I been missing something?
