Teaching Style
My approach to teaching philosophy is guided by a conviction that philosophy education should pursue a twofold aim: first, to transmit a substantive understanding of the content of a course; second, to help students cultivate a broad range of intellectual skills and virtues that are going to be applicable in whatever domain students decide to pursue in their lives. Assuring that philosophy teaching contains these two components is, to my mind, essential for making philosophy education useful and attractive to students regardless of whether they intend to keep studying the subject at the graduate level or pursue a career in philosophy.
1. Skills & Virtues
Many of the intellectual skills that I focus on in my teaching have to do with arguments. Through my teaching, I aim to enhance the capacity of students to identify arguments in the sources they deal with, to critically analyze them, and to formulate arguments of their own. Other skills that I target include conceptual analysis and engineering, and also skills of theory-analysis and theory-building. In terms of virtues, I strongly insist on truth-orientation, curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility.
Insofar as intellectual virtues are concerned, I take the list above to provide a heuristic, for there is no mechanical procedure to impart those kinds of virtues to people. Keeping this in mind, I believe that heuristics can be extremely helpful, and building a class environment in which skills and virtues like those are emphasized, valued, and practiced can have real and non-negligible positive effects on the intellectual development of students。
Some empirical evidence for the benefits of studying philosophy:
2. Class Activities
To reach the goals just outlined, my teaching style involves a variety of in-class activities. Examples of tasks that I ask students to engage in include the following: reconstructing an argument from a source in which it is not clearly stated, providing counterexamples to a certain claim, developing arguments in support or against a view, identifying unquestioned assumptions in a theory, analyzing a concept, and evaluating the aptness of a concept to theorize about a given question or domain. Depending on practical constraints such as class size and allocated time, these activities might be pursued in pairs, small groups, or also with the whole class. In practicing these activities, I also aim at fostering a climate of both intellectual stimulation and inclusivity, and so one in which students can feel free to test out and play with different ideas, present their own views, and bring their own perspectives to the table.
At the same time, these activities are supposed to be challenging in at least two ways. First, in Lev Vygotsky’s sense of a zone of proximal development, which is the idea that learning takes place in the space between what the learner can do without help from the instructor and what the learner cannot do at all. In other words, students will be challenged by being required to engage in tasks that they can solve, but only by making good use of the notions and tools newly provided to them in the course. Second, while making clear to students that the goal is not to evaluate their views but to give them tools to better elaborate and express those views, they will also be challenged to step outside their comfort zone, for example when asked to try to defend a view they might disagree with or when asked to debate with others
Some slides from my class activities and exercises (please refresh the page if the document does not show):
3. Course Content
How I decide to structure a course will largely depend on the kind of course that I am teaching. For an introductory course on early Chinese philosophy, I like to give priority to give students an overview of all the major figures in the debate at the time. Conversely, in cases of courses in the philosophy of religion or metaphysics, I like to take thematic approaches and survey a couple of interrelated topics as opposed to providing an overview of a lot of them.
As a cross-cultural philosopher, I am also committed to making my syllabi cross-culturally diverse. The draft syllabus downloadable in this section on the philosophy of religion is an example of that. Of course, cross-cultural diversity in a syllabus is good when it makes sense. For example, for the first class I taught, “Introduction to Critical Thinking,” I reached the conclusion that students’ learning would have benefited more from focusing solely on papers in contemporary analytic philosophy.
4. Exams & Assessment
In principle, my preferred form of assessment is papers, and for two main reasons. First, because I believe that being able to write in a way that is clear and articulated is an incredibly important skill both inside and outside of academia. Second, because my main goal is to help students develop their own views, and to do so in a way that creatively engages with the material. However, recent developments in artificial intelligence make take-home paper assignments a less attractive option. Accordingly, my intended strategy as an instructor is to use in-class exams for undergraduate students and to keep using papers as a form of assessment only for graduate courses, where I take the incentive on the part of students to use AI to cheat to be much lower.
For in-class exams, I like to use weekly or bi-weekly quizzes in addition to a final and, possibly, a midterm. Those weekly quizzes serve the function of giving students an incentive to stay on track while allowing me to get constant feedback about how their learning is going. Specifically, weekly or bi-weekly quizzes also allow me to identify the areas where students struggled the most, providing an opportunity to review those areas subsequently. Crucially, as my goal is still that of assessing the critical thinking ability of students in addition to their recollection of the material, my quizzes rarely rely on multiple-choice questions and similar prompts. Rather, I ask open-ended questions that require students to make use of their reasoning skills.
For graduate students, my general strategy would be to assign them one paper per course of 8000words maximum (all included), which is a common word limit for philosophy journals. Students can write on whatever they want, provided that it has a sufficient connection with the content of the course. Moreover, I intend to ask graduate students to send me drafts of their papers by the middle of the term, so that I can give them feedback on how to write the final version.
Introduction to Critical Thinking (UBC, Summer 2024) - Weekly assignments and Final (please refresh the page if the document does not show):
5. Teaching Experience
During my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, I had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant for a variety of courses. I made use of these occasions to practice my teaching skills by giving guest lectures on a broad range of topics (see below). Moreover, what allowed me to hone my teaching the most is probably the tutorial sessions I held for two terms for the course “Foundations of Chinese Thought.” They consisted of weekly meetings with three separate groups of students, in which I would help them understand the material through class discussion. In general, I would start from a brief, five-minute intro to allow students the time to concentrate on the topic. Then, I would use slides with some key questions stemming from the material but of broad philosophical interest to stimulate discussion. The discussion would typically start in small groups and then move to the whole class.
During 2024, I taught “Introduction to Critical Thinking.” As it was the summer term, classes were allocated three-hour slots, which allowed plenty of time for activities. The idea was to focus each class on a different philosophy paper on a topic that I thought might spark students’ interest (see syllabus). I kept the range of topics diverse to allow everyone to find something that they liked. Moreover, I selected the papers in such a way that they would allow me to introduce various tools of critical thinking, such as the distinctions between soundness and validity, that between descriptive and normative considerations, and the notions of a counterexample, a metal experiment, a reductio ad absurdum argument, and that of an infinite regress argument. Those notions provided a basis for designing class activities. Regarding assessment, students had a final as well as in-class 30-minute quizzes at the beginning of every week’s second class. I would mark the quizzes by the following class so that I could begin that class by discussing the exercises on which they struggled the most.
Teaching Evaluation for Introduction to Critical Thinking (please refresh the page if the document does not show):
Summary of Past Teaching Work
Courses Taught as Main Instructor
PHIL120 - Introduction to Critical Thinking - University of British Columbia - [Summer Term 1 - 2023/2024]
The aim of this course was to offer students training in exercising critical thinking. To do so, the course took a practice-based approach: each class focused on closely reading one or more papers that were analyzed in detail to identify and assess their argumentative structure. The topics varied from week to week and included arguments for and against God’s existence, arguments for the incompatibility of free will with determinism, arguments for and against abortion, and others.
Guest Lectures
Introduction to Confucius and the Analects (19 Sep 2024). Course: Foundations of Chinese Thought. Main Instructor: Edward Slingerland.
Self and Consciousness in the Upanishads (24 Jan 2024). Course: Philosophical Wisdom of Early India. Main Instructor: Emily Lawson.
Buddhism, Daoism, and Theism (22 Jun 2023). Course: Philosophy of Religion. Main Instructor: Anders Kraal.
Buddhism and Theism (05 Apr 2023). Course: Philosophy of Religion. Main Instructor: Anders Kraal.
Plantinga on Warrant and Christian Belief (06 Oct 2022). Course: Philosophy of Religion. Main Instructor: Evan Thompson.
Introduction to Analytic Philosophy (20 Jun 2022). Course: Introduction to Philosophy. Main Instructor: Anders Kraal.
Free Will - Part II (07 Apr 2022). Course: Introduction to Metaphysics. Main Instructor: Alexandre Duval.
Free Will - Part I (05 Apr 2022). Course: Introduction to Metaphysics. Main Instructor: Alexandre Duval.
Social Ontology (15 Mar 2022). Course: Introduction to Metaphysics. Main Instructor: Alexandre Duval.
Natural Kinds and Reference (08 Mar 2022). Course: Introduction to Metaphysics. Main Instructor: Alexandre Duval.
Mereology (03 Feb 2022). Course: Introduction to Metaphysics. Main Instructor: Alexandre Duval.
Aesthetic Experience in Abhinavagupta (25 Nov 2021). Course: Topics in Epistemology. Main Instructor: Catherine Prueitt.
Teaching Assistance
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University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2024/25 - Term 2 | Main instructor: Anders Kraal
University of British Columbia - Summer Session 2021/22 - Term 1 | Main instructor: Anders Kraal
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University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2024/25 - Term 1 | Main Instructor: Edward Slingerland
University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2023/24 - Term 1 | Main Instructor: Edward Slingerland [Included Tutorials]
University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2022/23 - Term 2 | Main Instructor: Edward Slingerland [Included Tutorials]
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University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2023/24 - Term 2 | Main instructor: Emily Lawson
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University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2023/24 - Term 2 | Main instructor: Anders Kraal
University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2023/24 - Term 1 | Main instructor: Evan Thompson
University of British Columbia - Summer Session 2022/23 - Term 1 | Main instructor: Anders Kraal
University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2022/23 - Term 2 | Main instructor: Anders Kraal
University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2022/23 - Term 1 | Main instructor: Evan Thompson
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University of British Columbia - Winter Session 2021/22 - Term 2 | Main instructor: Alexandre Duval
Winter Session 2021/22 - Term 1 - Winter Session 2021/22 - Term 1 | Main instructor: Anders Kraal