Most of this week has been a very different sort of writing project: creating syllabi for the courses I’ll be teaching in the coming semester. I’ve always struggled with the syllabus as a genre. Different institutions have different expectations, as do different disciplines. For the most part, I expect most of us reify the form in terms of what we ourselves experienced. Others are no doubt much more innovative than me.
While there are days I dream of being an independent writer whose only rhythm is reporting each day to my desk, I am still committed to teaching, for many reasons. Mostly because I love philosophy and love being an evangelist of sorts, introducing new generations to this communion of intellectual saints. But also because, more than ever, I think we need a philosophically-informed populace to stem the tides of what threaten a democratic republic: the lure of demagoguery, the no-nothing parties running our churches, and the brain-oozing banality of a consumerist culture.
And there’s a selfish reason, as a writer, to keep teaching: the classroom is a laboratory–a place to “field test” ideas, a way to stay in touch with the questions pressing upon rising generations, and an opportunity to learn with others as we encounter classic texts with fresh eyes in new contexts.
I think the one aspect of syllabus-writing I enjoy is the encapsulation of a course in an opening Course Description. The exercise is akin to enticing students to join you on a journey: here’s where we’re going and here’s why it matters.
This semester I’m teaching two courses and I thought it might be fun to offer a peek into how I’ll be spending the bulk of my time for the next four months.
PHIL 252 | The Christian Foundations of Modernity
This is a slightly curious course that, in some ways, could only exist at Calvin University. Originally this course served as the second in a sequence of courses in history of philosophy for our majors and minors. When, several years ago, the university changed our core curriculum and eliminated the philosophy requirement (don’t get me started) we, as a department, scrambled to find other ways to connect philosophy to the new core curriculum. One opening was a second-year requirement called “Foundations of Christianity II.” We reframed our “modern” philosophy course as an exploration of the Christian philosophical underpinnings of modernity. I’ve come to love the course, and in many ways, I think of this as the course where I try to retain the best of what Calvin was and should be. I also teach the course in a very idiosyncratic way that makes sense if, like me, you agree with Richard Rorty that we should stop trying to sucker freshmen into caring about mind-body dualism.
Here’s the Course Description:
This course engages key philosophers and texts from the “modern” era (1600-1900), not simply as a way to become familiar with the history of philosophy but as a genealogy of the present. The twenty-first century world we inhabit still carries the DNA of philosophical debates and revolutionary ideas that emerged in modernity. And as we will see, in important ways, our “secular” age is, in fact, the product of key debates within Christianity in the modern period.
While Enlightenment myths tend to portray modernity as an escape from faith, this course demonstrates that, in fact, the opposite is true: Christian questions, assumptions, and commitments propelled modern thought, even when critics were reacting to it. The course examines the Christian intellectual foundations of modernity in key philosophical figures. Opting for an in-depth engagement rather than a cursory survey, we will dive deeply into the work of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Philosophical questions in modernity arose from existential struggles at the intersection of faith and reason including questions about God’s existence, the certainty of our knowledge, the haunting of doubt, the problem of evil, the sources of morality, and the foundations for the good life.
This will be a slightly idiosyncratic, philosophically heterodox, take on the significance of modern philosophy insofar as it sees much of “early” modern philosophy (Descartes, Hume, Locke) as something of a misguided detour in the history of philosophy. Unlike canned surveys that treat Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” as some kind of fulcrum in the history of human thought, our approach views this supposed “revolution” as an overrated exercise whose significance has been inflated. Instead, we will be focus on the way modern philosophy unfolds as an ongoing exploration of the nature of rationality & truth, the significance of self-consciousness & authenticity, and what it means for humans to live well in community. As we will see, key Christian doctrines such as faith & reason, providence, Incarnation, and the relationship between creation, sin, & redemption are at the heart of these debates, even for figures who might ultimately reject Christian belief. As such, Christianity remains in the DNA of our contemporary world. When we understand the history of modern philosophy we better understand ourselves and our present.
PHIL 374 | Pragmatism: Knowledge as Practice
This is a senior-level seminar for philosophy majors that functions as a complement to another 300-level course in Continental philosophy (basically, phenomenology). In the spirit of “classroom-as-laboratory,” this is the course from which emerged my book, Who’s Afraid of Relativism? (but I never assign my own books as textbooks). This semester I’m letting Cornel West help students think about the shape of a “prophetic” pragmatism.
The Course Description:
This upper-level seminar is an in-depth introduction to a school of philosophy known as “pragmatism.” This stems from the Greek pragma, which means “act” or “deed,” from the same verb that gives us the word praxis, action. This reflects pragmatism’s emphasis on philosophy in service of how we live. As American philosopher Cornel West summarizes it, pragmatism is “a future-oriented instrumentalism that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action.” You might think of pragmatism as an oblique response to Marx’s famous complaint that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”
That doesn’t mean that pragmatism isn’t technical or serious, as if it is blandly “practical” or merely some form of philosophical activism. Pragmatism is a stream of philosophical reflection that turns “philosophy as a way of life” into a fundamental conviction about the nature of knowledge. Knowing is, at root, a social endeavor rooted in a community of practice. (You might think of pragmatism as an “analytic” school of thought with a “continental” heart.) Pragmatism developed from two different streams or sources. One impetus is the later work of Austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein. Another source is a distinctly American thread catalyzed by John Dewey. These two streams come together in Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. This seminar will be an in-depth engagement with key works by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and Cornel West.
One way to situate pragmatism in wider philosophical conversations is in terms of philosophy of language. We will explore philosophy of language under the rubric of Wittgenstein’s claim regarding “meaning as use.” Rather than tethering meaning to reference or correspondence, Wittgenstein sees meaning as the effect of a social context. This gives rise to a “pragmatic” tradition in philosophy of language in the work of Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. But it also echoes some themes in Augustine’s philosophy of language as articulated in De doctrina christiana. Cornel West will give us a taste of a more “indigenous” American pragmatism, inflected by his own Christian faith.
When the blue books and papers are stacked up, I’ll be singing a different tune. But all things considered, this isn’t a bad way to spend one’s life.