Teacher's Guide - Class Planning Guide

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The Contract
Part 1 - [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] | Part 2 - [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] | Part 3 - [12[13] [14] [15]

Advice: You could easily skip the sections on free will (14.4 to 14.7) or personal identity (14.8 to 14.10), though they are marked as essential, if time or your preferences suggest not doing the whole chapter. The material on primary and secondary qualities (14.1, 14.2, 14.3) could also be omitted, but this would require some explaining to the class of allusions made to it in the expositions of the other topics.

Alternatively, you could cover free will and ignore primary/secondary. If so, you will have to ignore an analogy between free will and secondary qualities that shapes the exposition. That analogy, and the fact that the chapter is called "deep illusions," may give some students the impression that the free will sections are arguing that freedom is an illusion. Don't let them think that: it is important to see that both compatibilism and libertarianism conclude that freedom is real. Only hard determinism sees it as an illusion. The activities in 14.6 involve a fairly complex comparison of freedom and secondary qualities. A simpler way of using the material in 14.6 would be to go straight to the positions (i)-(iii) and discuss how they relate to the arguments (a)-(c). That would be a better procedure for most classes, unless you have discussed the freedom/secondary quality comparison in detail.

The topic of section 14.11, the meanings life can have, is not on many standard first-year philosophy syllabuses. But it is a topic that students will expect a philosophy course to address. You may find it a useful topic for a session approaching a holiday when you have finished one large topic and do not want to begin another large one. I find that the issue that provokes most discussion in this material is the contrast between transcendental approval and existential courage. Neither label will be familiar to students, but the general idea of the first will be familiar. The general idea of the second will not be, though some will find that it gathers together scattered thoughts for them. A way of framing the discussion is: just as social contract theorists claim that materialists can have full-blooded distinctions between right and wrong, so existentialists claim to have a godless account of the meaning of life. Can existential courage really do the work in maintaining one's sanity and self-respect that for many people transcendental approval does?