Reasoning Skills and 'Getting Over Yourself'

As the semester rolls on, I have been spending a lot of time with the students I am TAing debating course material in my tutorial, they are very enthousaistic kids who love the topic, so it's very easy to get them into a great discussion. Since they are still only in first year, I do have to stop to discuss reasoning problems like biases and fallacies to keep us on the right track. I've been encouraging my students, especially the ones who seemromising, to take a course that will help them with such reasoning issues. In Windsor we had one called reasoning skills and at McMaster we have critical thinking. I've served as a TA for both of them.

When I was an undergrad myself, I used to think these courses were certainly necessary but not really philosophy. It was more like the 'tutorial' level of a videogame, where you grasped the basic controls so you could understand how to play. In my mind 'real' philosophy courses were about critically examining the ideas of major figures in philosophy. What I see now, however, is a little different. Reasoning courses certainly teach us the basics of how to think well, but they are also an opportunity for meditation on some of the most important questions of philosophy: what is a good philosopher and what is philosophy about?

For many teenagers, myself included, philosophy starts out as a self-aggrandizing practice. We come to the discussion hoping to prove that we are intelligent, at least more intelligent than our interlocutor, and that we are mature enough to know the 'truth' about philosophical questions. This is a very exciting opportunity for young people, as up to this point in our loves we may not have had much autonomy or recognition from our community. The freedom, excitement and pride that come with moving into a dorm room isn't that different from the feeling of being invited to tackle a subject like abortion. It's perfectly normal and healthy to feel excited to prove oneself in philosophical combat, but it's only a phase of development.

Over the course of a reasoning skills course, students gradually learn the skills and rules of argumentation, but they also learn about why those skills and rules are in place. Someone who sees themselves as a combatant might resort to any kind of sophistry to get their way and assert themselves, or they might, like a knight, see their dignity as a combatant in following some kind of code. In examining the rules if argumentation and why we follow them, still others might see themselves as part of a philosophical team, examining problems from all angles to come as close to the truth as possible. Reasoning skills courses invite a more complex understanding of our role in philosophical discourse. 

The last two types, the knight and the team member, will certainly learn something about philosophical humility: being prepared to admit when they are wrong, and being prepared to listen and learn from others, even marginalized groups with unique experiences, to improve their own work. 

I used to have a little aphorism I would share with my friends, almost as an inside joke, 'real philosophy is about constantly getting over yourself.' No matter what you believe, there may come a time when you realize you are wrong. Philosophy is about being able to get over yourself and keep going in those moments. Not to let being wrong crush you. Being able to accept that the values you hold at the deepest part if you will always be changing, and that you will survive it. You might think that holding such a belief would lead you to be superficial and nonchalant about your life, but I've found the people who really understand this process are some of the joyous ones I know. In the end, this is what I really want for my students. Not to be great philosophers in some professional sense, but to learn to be critical and humble enough to not attach their sense of self to always being right.

Multimedia and the Philosophy Makeover

It was thanks to my friend Grant, who does a great deal of work in public Philosophy, that I was introduced to the problem of how to make philosophy accessible to the public. After all, I feel philosophy has greatly enriched my life, and I want to share that enrichment with as many people as I can. My discussions with Grant have lead me to the conclusion the philosophy as it is done today needs a makeover. (How I wish I had a GIF of Rene Descartes in What not to Wear that I could insert here)

At the beginning of our lectures on Sartre's Existentialism is a humanism, our professor told us about how Sartre had spontaneously delivered this entire piece to a room, packed elbow to elbow with people from all kinds of different backgrounds- Catholics, Communists, Philosophers and the common person. the room had been so packed that several people had to be taken to the hospital for fainting from the heat, and Sartre had sent them into a hushed silence the moment he spoke. Sartre was a rock star, and philosophy was on top of it's game in that time- everyone wanted to know what he had to say, which was great, because he had an important message. Today, I am lucky if prospective undergrads even know what the word philosophy means. What has changed and what can we do about it?

In my undergraduate honors seminar, which focused on identity, the students were expected to lead the discussion instead of the professor. We had a lot of fun and it was more relaxed while still being intellectually engaging, but one thing that quickly came to the fore when student led the discussion was that our early philosophical texts- the ones from which we drew our illustrations and thought experiments- were anything but texts. Most of the time we used films like the Matrix, Blade Runner and Dark City (a personal favourite of mine) as the currency of concepts. This was a great annoyance to our professor, who, likely being on the brink of retirement, had grown up and learned about philosophy in a completely different media landscape.

Today, media has changed even more form the days when people mostly read books for entertainment, and philosophers, as a result, are beginning to look at argumentation differently. Leo Groake for example, has been talking about visual argumentation. What this makes me wonder however, is why academic philosophy has not taken advantage of the diverse media landscape. In his day, Sartre wrote tons of entertaining fiction and some marvelous plays that no doubt led the average French citizen to wonder what philosophy was all about, and today with web 2.0 we have even less of an excuse to abstain. Philosophers have experts on hand to help them navigate the world of text publishing, so why do we not have access to experts in art, film, game development, or theatre?

No doubt this is partly because of tradition and partly because of expenses, but I think one very legitimate reason philosophers work mainly in text is because this makes clear communication (and therefore clear response) easier. Still I wonder if there is a way we could both communicate in a way that is clear and easily addressable and still accessible and engaging to the public. One other concern that I imagine I would hear from theorists like Neil Postman (I love his Teaching as a Subversive Activity) is that as philosophical works become more entertaining students are more likely to sit back passively and expect to be entertained (which is interesting because I find him to be a very entertaining writer). That may (or may not) have held true in an age where such entertaining education came in passive forms such as television or film, but I think in the age of web 2.0 we see a very active response to new information. On the internet, people can't resist the temptation to leave a comment (though such comments are not always well thought-out or rigorous), but we also see people responding to media by creating their own videos, writing blogs, reupholstering furniture, dancing, protesting, or inventing new memes. I think the media climate we have right now is the perfect opportunity to bring philosophy back to the people.