My Mill Course: A Recap

For the spring quarter I taught a 10-week course on John Stuart Mill. Time to look back, or as we now say, "to assess." I asked to teach this course because I've admired Mill but am not an expert and was looking for a way to increase my expertise by a notch.

Expectations.

• that Mill would be a clear writer for all that I assigned (most of which I had not read for a decade) and that his positions would be clear.
• that my students, going into this advanced upper-division course, would be familiar with some version of utilitarianism and that most would be well-disposed towards consequentialism.
• that applying Mill to contemporary issues would be irresistible.
• that Mill's philosophy would have the appeal of being libertarian, and since that's a prevalent political philosophy among our students, that clarifying his libertarianism would be a popular discussion topic.
• that the course would cover a wide range of issues and increase the depth of our knowledge of the 19th century (my own and my students').

Expectations, Met.

• Mill is a clear writer--so clear that the many points at which he fails to be consistent in his views were obvious. This was actually good because it meant that my students could develop good criticisms of their own and develop confidence in their critical abilities.

Expectations, Failed.

• Students entered the class with no memory of utilitarianism, even if they had taken an ethics course. Many students met only the minimal requirement of one previous philosophy course, and for some that course was critical thinking, a course which did not include Mill. For others, I never figured out why there knowledge (memory?) of Mill was rudimentary or non-existent. Except that I did notice that some were unable to compare/contrast Mill's "Liberty" with his "Utilitarianism" even when only 2 weeks had passed between these discussions. Quite a number of them seemed to know the material well enough, and then a few weeks later, to have no specific memory of it. Were they faking it in the first place? Possibly. Had they failed to develop skills for committing their thoughts to long-term memory? Probably.
• It was irresistible to apply Mill to contemporary issues, but students found it difficult or impossible to apply his views in a way that challenged their pre-existing views. For example, any discussion of Mill on marriage quickly devolved into a catalog of reasons in support of gay marriage without an attempt to understand the reasons some people oppose or the specific arguments that would derive from Mill. Several students continued to believe that Mill wrote against the polygamist Mormons in "On Liberty," even though we discussed that topic in class on two separate days. I would like to develop techniques for making my class discussions both lively (which they are) and progressive, in the sense that the discussion moves people from one position to another. Rather, the discussion only seems expressive. It does not affect people's beliefs about what they have read, or else their (often shallow or false) views become even more entrenched.

Expectations, Exceeded.

• Although contemporary libertarianism was only of interest to 3 students (only 2 of whom actually came to class), I was able to investigate this question easily on my own and was satisfied to improve my understanding.
• We had more than enough material to make 10 very densely packed weeks (it's a 4ch course). I spent the last week on epistemology (induction, Mill's methods, and his hope for the development of the social sciences). I might have left that material off. The course could be extended very easily to a longer term by adding contemporary utilitarianism to the mix.

Although I got to know him better than I had even hoped, my appreciation of Mill was not diminished after 10 weeks of intense study. I learned much more about his faults (and especially the inconsistences of his application of his views to the issues of his time), but I also saw the value of a philosophical life spent developing a thoroughly comprehensive and consistent view.

Trees and taking the long view

A debate in environmental ethics revolves around the idea that if the value of nature is dependent on humans valuing it, the whales, the wolves, and the woods will be traded in for the next bright and shiny thing that catches the human eye. On the other side, there are those of us who are compelled, for philosophical reasons, to be anthropocentrists, while hoping that humans have the sense to take the long view.

Here's an article about some people who do:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22094279

It describes people who choose trees to fell for resonance wood--dense wood from which to make the best violins and guitars.

Pellegrini "gardens" the forest, as he puts it. But he gardens for people who will not be born for hundreds of years. So that there will be fine resonance spruce in the 24th Century.

These people are serious about both the wood and their woods:

Around here you would not be surprised to learn that people wear paper shirts and grate wood shavings on their spaghetti.

No characters, no plot, no story

Jonathan Wolff (a philosopher) writes in The Guardian about how boring academic writing is.
Choice line:

It explains why academic writing is generally so much easier to put down than it is to pick up again.

He argues that a good story depends on there being a tension between what happens and the revelation of what happens. E.g, you know what's going to happen next, but the protagonist is dangerously unaware of the banana peel lurking under her boot.

Academic writing can't be this way, or it shouldn't be this way, or it's risky when it's this way. I'm not so old that I can't remember back to my way of writing as a naive philosophy student. I would pick an unpopular position, but I wouldn't reveal the argument until the last possible minute. "It's not a detective  story," my professor would say. Those papers flopped.

I still resist opening a paper with the roadmap approach: "First, I will argue that xyz-ism is inevitable. Second, I will show that given the inevitability of xyz-ism, it is also necessary. Finally, this point will be used to launch a criticism of the contingency of xyz-ism."

Although philosophy papers aren't known for cliffhangers, I can think of a few that have style. Just a touch of tension may be all that's needed.

The Flipped Classroom

My university is all about flipped classrooms. All the teaching awards and grants are going to people who "flip" their classrooms.

From what I can tell, this indicates a willingness to dumb down material as far as you possibly can. Instead of asking students to read and write, you ask them to watch some music videos at home (but not more than 5 to 7 minutes at a time) and then entice them to come play video games in class.

Want to know more about flipping classrooms? Here's the top link from a Google search for "flipped classroom." True to style, it explains pedagogy through clip art (including an image of a student doing work from bed--with the covers pulled up!), a flow chart that never uses a concept requiring more than three words to explain, and information transfer which approaches zero.

I call it "flipping the class" for the "flipped-off classroom."

Education and Breadth

I'm one week into my spring term. It's the time of the teaching season when profs ask each other "Did you get a good start? What are you teaching? Is it interesting?"

We all mean: can you make it through the next 10 weeks with enough vim and vigor to start your summer research plans without first going on a bender?

When I answer the question by saying that I'm lucky to be teaching an upper-division course on John Stuart Mill, I get blank stares. I expected my friends and colleagues, none of them philosophers but most with advanced degrees--even PhD's--to have a sense of who Mill was. At least to know that this course has to do with 19th century history, maybe ethics or something like that.

In fact, the classes' first reading assignment started like this:

Who wrote On Liberty? Nearly everyone with a college education could tell you – well – should be able to tell you that the author is John Stuart Mill.

But no. My well-educated, inquisitive, politically-informed friends give me blank stares. They have advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, business, engineering. (Business, even! No matter that Mill's Principles of Political Economy was influential in its time.) Mentioning utilitarianism or "the greatest good for the greatest number" does not jar something loose or get a glimmer of recognition.

Here I've been down on "No Child Left Behind" and its effect on my current students. But if the intellectuals around here--the ones in their 30s, 40s, and 50s with the benefit of good college educations and post-grad education on top of that are absolutely unaware of one of the leading intellects of the 19th century, then my expectations must be completely out of line.

Let's talk about the important stuff going on in our own times instead.

On a side note, when given the argument below and asked to categorize it as valid or invalid, true premises or not, my students want to know if they're going to be held responsible for all kinds of arcane literary and historical facts which have nothing to do with philosophy!

Since Moby Dick was written by Shakespeare, and Moby Dick is a science fiction novel, it follows that Shakespeare wrote a science fiction novel.

Re-reading the Canon Series

The Re-reading the Canon Series from Penn State Press has become much larger than I realized! And it's been growing for nearly 20 years.

The titles are "Feminist Interpretations of X," and they cover the canon stalwarts (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel) as well as some surprises (Emma Goldman, Ayn Rand). Some recent additions include Thomas Hobbes, Jane Addams, and Richard Rorty.

The essays from the mid-1990's, e.g. in the collection on Plato, are delightfully, charmingly po-mo. I assigned the collection on Quine to a seminar once, and have drawn on the essays about Dewey for classes as well.

As I prepare my spring quarter seminar, I turned to the series to see if there is a collection on Mill. Apparently not! Quel dommage.

Collaboration

I'm preparing to teach an undergraduate course on John Stuart Mill. This is an excuse for me to spend 10 weeks re-reading some of my favorite history of philosophy. It's also part of my program to teach in ways that highlight women philosophers--contemporary and historical. I came across this little piece (from 2009) by Jo Ellen Jacobs about the nature of John Stuart Mill's collaboration with Harriet Taylor.

"The Second Scribe"

The abstract (from PhilPapers):
On Liberty celebrates a collaborative theory of knowing exemplified in the way Harriet and John worked together. They believed fervently in the power of individuals struggling together to grasp the truth – including both the “idealistic” belief that there is truth as opposed to mere subjective opinion, and a deep scepticism about the beliefs accepted by the majority.

Data, yes. But values first.

By David Brooks in the New York Times.

What Data Can't Do

Toward the end:

Data obscures values. I recently saw an academic book with the excellent title, “ ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron.” One of the points was that data is never raw; it’s always structured according to somebody’s predispositions and values. The end result looks disinterested, but, in reality, there are value choices all the way through, from construction to interpretation.

(from Will Krieger)

Intended insult gone awry

First-grade child, in the car: Mom!

Me: What?

Child: Dad!

John: What?

Child: Ha-ha, what's a nerd word!

John: No, why's a nerd word.

Me: Non-linear's a nerd word.

John: Ontological's a nerd word.

Me: DEontological's a nerd word. Epigenetic's a nerd word. Etiology's a nerd word.

John: We're very proud of our nerd words, son.

Me: Nerd words? Now you're speaking my language.

Is this the same dialogue I read?

Exam Question:
Describe Meno's paradox, also called the Paradox of Inquiry. What solution to the paradox is proposed by Socrates in the dialogue? Do you think this is a satisfactory solution to the puzzle? If not, how would you resolve the paradox? (15 pts.)

Student answer:
"This is the paradox of a slave boy who went to Meno to recollect taxes."

Ann Cahill at 3am

Ann Cahill of Elon University interviewed at 3AM magazine--on feminist philosophy, on intersubjectivity, and on a phenomenology of pregnancy loss.

The only thing is, I'm not so sure that the interviewer is right that women in philosophy have it worse than women in other academic subjects. I cringe at the stories I hear from engineering and computer science. But then again, there are also some strong forms of recognition of gender-based disparity in those areas, and we should hope to learn from the strategies STEM disciplines have developed.

Undergrad tips for participation

One of my new undergrad advisees asked me how to participate in a philosophy discussion class. This is not something I usually teach explicitly, and it was never taught to me explicitly, and why not? Because a discussion with skilled participants makes all the difference.

This particular student is not shy--he's an officer in his fraternity. So he's not asking for help with that. He's asking about quality, and he pointed out that he doesn't want to imitate what some students do because he thinks the way they participate wastes class time. He might be right! But he also might have a mistaken idea about what a good or bad comment is.

Since I wrote a lot for him, I thought it would be worth copying here:

If you go to a public lecture, you will see that our faculty members each have their own style for asking questions. Actually, most of us have a toolbox that includes a few different question types. For instance, one of us usually asks an apparently simple question of clarification which he has carefully planned so that the speaker will say something controversial, and he follows up with the question "So do you realize that the implication of what you're saying is the usually undesirable outcome X?" Others often ask the speaker if they have examined the connection between what they're saying and some other philosopher. One of us comes right out and says "I disagree with your starting assumptions."

So developing a style for engaging in public is a good thing to think about—we've all done that, maybe explicitly or maybe we just let our style emerge over time.

The first thing to do, then, is to watch what other students (and professors) do, and start evaluating the kinds of questions/comments and the ways of saying them which you think are especially effective or ineffective. Then practice one kind of question yourself. Even if you just have one kind of question/comment that you feel comfortable making, and which you can fashion to fit different circumstances, then you're in good shape.

One of the things you should ask yourself is whether you are better at reacting to other people or better at expressing a thought that is independent of what other people have said. Because depending on the answer, you'll need to be mentally prepared to jump in in different ways. Usually professors give an opening for the latter strategy. Either at the beginning or at the end, they ask "Is there anything about this reading you didn't understand?" or "Is there something else about this debate that we should cover?" And that's your cue.

If you're better at reacting, then you just have to be ready to let your spring-loaded question get tripped and come out your mouth. For instance, I'm better at reacting than starting a conversation, but as an undergrad I used to be really, really slow to respond, and then I would leave every class thinking "Why didn't I just say what I was thinking?" I had to practice being faster, and that's how I developed the bad habit of talking over other people. In some circumstances, it's rude, and in other circumstances, it's how to get heard.

The second thing to do is to have a couple of strategies and types of questions in mind, and the kind that you start developing will depend on the above choice. If you can react, professors LOVE it when one student calls another student out (but in a gentle, respectful, kind way) for saying something that doesn't make sense. Your participation goal is not necessarily to interact with the professor—it's just as good (and probably better) to interact with other students. For instance: "Pat, I think what you just said about the evil demon is really interesting, but you also said that Descartes is an empiricist. I'm curious if you could say more about that because I think of Descartes as a rationalist."

Another thing that professors LOVE is if you can make a connection with a different class day. This is something that can sometimes be prepared ahead of time. "I found myself following along with Marx when he makes a point about the power of the proletariat. But just last week I had a positive feeling toward Nietzsche when he wrote about the powerful individual. Yes, I want to be a powerful individual, but I also want to stand in solidarity with my people. Professor, is there a tension here? What do you make of it?"

Which reminds me—some but not all professors like to be asked what they think about a controversy or interpretation. Well, really everyone likes to be asked, but some will refuse to say.

Finally, you can always ask questions of clarification. "I didn't really get how the revolution is supposed to happen, especially if the ruling class controls the means of public communication. What am I missing?" Or more simply "What is the proletariat? I read this but I'm still confused." Or an interesting one "Is this idea supposed to apply to our time? And if it does, who would the proletariat be right now? The 99%? The 47%? Just people who are homeless?" Asking these kinds of questions does not make you look stupid (although you should do the reading and not just ask basic questions without reading). It makes you look like you're paying attention to details.

So the summary is:

You can improve participation by 

1. planning ahead

2. recognizing the openings and invitations that apply to the kind of comment/question you're best at

3. practicing one particular kind or style of comment/question over and over again until it feels natural to you.

Anne Jaap Jacobson interview

Anne Jaap Jacobson is interviewed at 3AM Magazine, called "the neurofeminist philosofunkster."
I'm not exactly sure what a Philosofunkster is, but I'm quite sure that the world needs more of them!

The interview ranges across intentionality (skepticism but not eliminativism), neuroscience, experimental philosophy, what makes certain forms of analytic philosophy so excruciatingly tedious, what feminist philosophy adds to other approaches, David Hume, and the roadblocks put down for women in philosophy and science.

One part worth noting quotes a report from the AHA:

People seem to be uncertain about whether a woman can do science, and dead certain that a female philosopher has no place in that world.

I could recount a host of other insults, some quite large and some small, and the very worst of it all is that it accomplishes just about nothing, saps one’s strength and weakens one’s morale. This is happening to women in philosophy across the country. When I recently felt I was being done substantial harm, I hired a lawyer. I have since learned I know a number of successful women who have finally gone the same route. The American History Association’s 2005 report on the Status of Women notes that among senior women in their field:

“There is more than enough resignation, bitterness, disillusionment, and discouragement to warrant a more serious and extensive consideration of gender in the profession than we were able to carry out in this survey. … The profession as a whole should be concerned that so many successful women feel they have suffered from gender discrimination. Female talent is being squandered in fights over large and small issues that could be ameliorated by the attentiveness of administrators, department chairs, and colleagues, and the establishment of more transparent institutional procedures.”

And history is supposed to be much better than philosophy. As numerous studies are pointing out, we badly need administrators who will not accept what can amount to a prolonged harassment of women.

Twin-Earth, Hilary Putnam, and the 47%

Philosophy of science exam question:

What does a theory of reference aim to give an account of? Why is a theory of reference relevant for philosophy of science?

An exam answer:

A theory of reference aims to provide a guide for finding the source for entitlement. 

Women in Politics = Women in Philosophy

Sam, a student in my Feminist Theory course, points out that the percentage of people with full-time teaching jobs who are women is about 17% and that the percentage of people in Congress who are women is also about 17%.

No claim about magic numbers here, but just an interesting mirroring.
17% of U.S. Senators are women.
16.6% of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives are women.

In both cases, there is nothing about the work that's done that would predispose women to have less ability or experience than men. (Indeed, in both cases isn't the work related to universals? That is, in the political body, a single representative stands for all constituents, and in philosophy, the philosopher identifies universal truths.) Also in both cases, the methods involve adversarial discussion, and the field's history is predominately male and symbolically masculine.